Jobapalooza

As I alluded to in this morning's Stupidinews, job loss predictions for December were mostly in the "slightly less than November's disastrous numbers" category. Payroll company ADP just unzipped its fly and peed all over that.

Private employers shed 693,000 jobs in December, up sharply from the revised 476,000 jobs lost in November and far more than economists estimated, separate reports showed Wednesday.

ADP released its forecast using new methodology that the firm said would more closely reflect the nation's economic picture. The company's numbers had been consistently missing the mark, underestimating job losses as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Another report, from outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas, showed that planned layoffs at U.S. firms eased in December from the previous month's seven-year high but they were up an astounding 275 percent annually as the year-old recession cut a huge swathe of destruction through job market.

And given how bad the holiday retail sales season was in December and the new fiscal quarter/year upon us, I think that January prediction of one million jobs lost is going to be very accurate.

As bad as 2008 was, 2009 is going to be wall-to-wall disaster for the economy. If this level of job loss in America continues a full blown depression is certainly feasible. Could 2009 really see ten million jobs lost in 12 months? I honestly don't think that's out of the picture at all.

It may even be lowballing it. That's how worrying this is.