WWRD? What Would Roubini Do?

I though Nouriel Roubini was a LITTLE too bearish with this call for 6 million U.S. Job losses. Judging from what we are seeing he might be correct. 10 minute video if you choose to pull your head away from the Kool Aid.



I am thinking something around 4.5M "official" (using government numbers) job losses in 2009. 600K down, 3.9M to go. But Roubini's 6M surely cannot be called out of question; if the government was factual in how they measure I'd say 6M easy.

We should be able to do 500-600K a month quite "easy" the next 4 months so that's 2M losses alone. Then if we "reduce" to 200-400K a month the rest of the year, the other 2M should be "in the bag" over the last 7 months. Again this is "official" numbers; I believe it to be far worse in reality.

Just keep in mind that when layoffs are announced there is a federal law that requires a 60 day notice to employees. Therefore all these losses announced in the past few weeks are going to show up as job losses at the earliest in March. Hence will show up earliest in the April government report. I am still sticking with my 2008 prediction that we will reach 10% 2009 unemployment by "government numbers" .....which in reality will mean by old standards we will have a 20% unemployment rate. (5%ish of that is underemployment)

However, I advise you to buy stocks since China is going to save us.