Austerity for all! What could possible go wrong?

One of the on-going arguments across the blogosphere and even the entire world is whether the economic problems of the last ten years are more related to incompetence or basic corruption. I must say, just the last week has offered plenty of evidence for both views. For example, we had this article from Bloomberg yesterday (Tuesday, November 29) about how then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson met with his hedge fund buddies and gave them the first class insider information on his plans to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into “conservatorship.”

Hey what do you know? We actually had a modest gain in jobs this last month. The economy gained 117,000 jobs according the statistics released this morning. That is actually better than the number that analysts were predicting, which was around 85,000.

Unfortunately that is all the good news there is on this. The economy needs 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with the rate of population growth, so if you are a glass half empty person, we came up 33,000 jobs short of what we needed to break even.