Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Zero Hedge reminds us that every time ECRI Leading Economic Index has hit -10% or worse, we have had a recession.  Today's weekly reading?  -9.8%. Tyler Durden:

The ECRI Leading Economic Index just dropped to a fresh reading of 120.6 (flat from a previously revised 121.5 as the Columbia profs scramble to create at least a neutral inflection point): this is now a -9.8 drop, and based on empirical evidence presented previously by David Rosenberg, and also confirming all the macro economic data seen in the past two months, virtually assures that the US economy is now fully in a double dip recession scenario.

It's no longer a question of if we'll be facing the double-dip scenario, but when the Power That Be will admit we're now in a long-term depression and have been since December 2007, and that we need to take drastic action to get out.  The alarm bells at the fire station are now ringing, and the firemen are being told to conserve water because the town reservoir is low and to start praying for the next hard rain to put out the blaze.

Meanwhile, here's even worse news from Ezra Klein:

That's job growth per month on the X axis, and how many months that level of job growth would take to get us back to pre-recession levels on the Y axis. Notice that adding new jobs at a rate of 200,000 a month would take us 150 months -- or 12.5 years -- to get back to normalcy. So far, only April has seen more than 200,000 in non-census jobs growth -- and even then, just barely.

Beautiful.  Lost decade, here the hell we come.  Taking all that together, it's looking like very soon we're going to be in a situation where we're going to need ol' Helicopter Ben's printing press to try to save the economy.  The jobs aren't coming back for a long long time...if ever.

I'd say this is the new normal, but something tells me we're in for a hell of a lot worse.