Firsts

Our country has a new President. Barack Obama is bringing a whole lotta firsts to the White House… not to mention a First African American and a first grandmother/mother-in-law. Clearly he has set the stage for an unprecedented firsts of: open communication, transparency, and my favorite… participation.

And here is the country he has inherited...

Both the number of unemployed persons (11.6 million) and the unemployment rate (7.6 percent) rose in January. Over the past 12 months, the number of unemployed persons has increased by 4.1 million and the unemployment rate has
risen by 2.7 percentage points. This is the worst our jobs face has looked in 30 some years.

U.S. home foreclosures for January increased 57 percent from a year earlier or eight percent from the prior month. Nearly 20% of the nation's home sales in 2008 were of bank-repossessed properties. Another 11% were short sales, in which homeowners owed more in mortgage debt than their homes were worth. And the worse news in all of this is that about $3.3 trillion in home equity was erased in 2008, with $1.4 trillion of that wipeout coming in the fourth quarter.

U.S. consumer spending fell for a record sixth straight month in December as recession-battered households, worried about surging layoffs, boosted their savings rates to the highest level since May 2008.

American families are struggling with an intensifying recession that's already the longest in a quarter-century. Overall economic growth plunged at an annual rate of 3.8 per cent in the final three months of last year, the biggest quarterly decline since a 6.4 per cent drop in the first quarter of 1982.

Automobile sales plunged to their worst level in 26 years in January. Chrysler is down 55-percent, General Motors sales tumbled 49-percent, and Ford reported a 42-percent decline. And last I checked it wasn't much better for foreign makes. Toyota, Nissan and Honda all saw sales fall.