And some analysts still believe unemployment is a lagging indicator to the economy... not giving any attention to the fact that unemployment worsens the core reason for this recession (defaults on debt).

The economy may actually grow one of these quarters, but long term it's still very bad. Where is the momentum for a recovery going to come from? It certainly won't come from consumers since they are stuffed to the gills with debt, so the US central bank will keep printing money to cover public spending. This can cause the next disaster if nothing else does.

PS: Oh, and there's still the commercial real estate disaster waiting to happen.

It's all good in any case, the parties are in bed with one another.

for the guys arguing about wars, one of you is supposed to believe that war is good for the economy, so one of you is doing this wrong...

Wars are good for economy in someway, if the population is reduced enough, the survivors will have steady economy for a while, plus war usually brings tecnology and some chance of progress, many countrys have become way stronger thanks to war, just look at Japan

Still you have to be brainless to promote war

That is really bad news, 9.6 % seems very high for America, i wonder how will the government try to tackle it? And Democrats cant really blame Bush anymore, they control congress since 2006 (and since then Bush was a lame duck) , tackling unemployment should be more important then Obama's healthcare plans.

Amen to that.  Google lists it as 9.7%  Obama is tackling heathcare in large part b/c GE made him president.  Ever wonder why MSNBC (owned by GE) is so pro-Obama?

I can almost guarantee you this will be a double-dip recession.

Just for the record, when I started screaming about bailouts, and how it was the worst thing we could do, Bush was in office. This is not just Obama.

As for the burning building analogy, that’s pretty good. The one thing it lacks is the translation of effort.

The world runs on effort. We convert that into money and track GDP, but GDP is really just a measure of work/time.

The longer we draw out the falling economy, is that much time we lose. In essence, we are holding ourselves hostage, and paying a fortune to do so.

Bailout are the most ridicilous things (which i never understood) at the moment in Western Economies, people were so quick to criticise capitalism , forgeting that keynesian economics failed few times before. And as we see helping companies doesnt improve the state of economy

One of the biggest headscratchers for me has been:

The left (as well as the public at large - something that the left really connects with) is the idea of 'crony capitalism' and the corporate state, where megacorps own the country, and the public become second fiddle. They've always hammered away at the Republicans being the instigators of this problem yet:

• The government purchased and loaned to failing mega-businesses such as GM and Crysler because they were too important
• The government subsidized toxic assets from mega banks because they were 'too big to fail'
• Stimulus money is going toward businesses instead of citizens to stimulate the economy

All under Democratic watch by either the congress and senate (bank bailout) or the presidency (stimulus)

With these being the case, I gotta ask: Which party is the one of promoting a corporate-owned government?

The problem is that we're proping up bad businesses, which in the end is a failing idea. Many in here argue 'But if we didn't help them, they'd lose their job!'. The problem is that even with spending the govt. money, they will still lose their job because they are still in a failing business, and using shoddy business practices that got us to where we are at. Would it not be better to ensure that the money is being spent on something sustainable? We we've spent ~1.5 trillion dollars between the stimulus and the bank bailouts, and we've learned that it isn't changing the corporate culture, but encouraging it.

Oh, as for who passed the bank bailout:

74-25 voted in favor of the bailout in the senate on October 2008. 14 (28%) Republicans and 9 (18%) Dems voted against it.

In the Congress, it was ratified 263-171. 108 Republicans (54%) voted against it, while 63 Democrats (27%) voted against it.

Yeah, I just came back from a College Republican meeting and we had a VA delegate candidate there - Eric Brescia - he is an economist and moved his assets to gold before the slump. He predicts we will have a double dip. I have been telling VGC folks this since late 2008.