9.7% unemployment. Jobless recovery sucks.

Krugman:

the purpose of stimulus is, first and foremost, to mitigate unemployment. The fact that the economy may be technically in recovery is irrelevant.

At Calculated Risk, which Krugman had linked to:

According to the BLS, there are almost 5.0 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is 3.2% of the civilian workforce.

The good news is there wasn't much of an increase from July. The bad news is many of these 5 million long term unemployed will start exhausting their extended unemployment benefits soon. According to the projections by the National Employment Law Project about 0.5 million will have exhausted their benefits by the end of this month (September) and about 1.5 million by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Roubini warns about a possible "W" shaped recession:

There are also now two reasons why there is a rising risk of a double-dip W-shaped recession. For a start, there are risks associated with exit strategies from the massive monetary and fiscal easing: policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they take large fiscal deficits seriously and raise taxes, cut spending and mop up excess liquidity soon, they would undermine recovery and tip the economy back into stag-deflation (recession and deflation).

But if they maintain large budget deficits, bond market vigilantes will punish policymakers. Then, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields would rise and borrowing rates will go up sharply, leading to stagflation.

Another reason to fear a double-dip recession is that oil, energy and food prices are now rising faster than economic fundamentals warrant, and could be driven higher by excessive liquidity chasing assets and by speculative demand. Last year, oil at $145 a barrel was a tipping point for the global economy, as it created negative terms of trade and a disposable income shock for oil importing economies. The global economy could not withstand another contractionary shock if similar speculation drives oil rapidly towards $100 a barrel.

In summary, the recovery is likely to be anaemic and below trend in advanced economies and there is a big risk of a double-dip recession.

Awful.

And, Ken Rogoff (HT) writes that:

For now, the good news is that the crisis will be contained as long as government credit holds up. The bad news is that the rate at which government debt is piling up could easily lead to a second wave of financial crises within a few years.

Most worrisome is America's huge dependence on foreign borrowing, particularly from China ― an imbalance that likely planted the seeds of the current crisis.

Asians recognize that if they continue to accumulate paper debt, they risk the same fate that Europeans suffered three decades ago, when they piled up U.S. debt that was dramatically melted down through inflation.

The question today is not why no one is warning about the next crisis. They are. The question is whether political leaders are listening.

The unwinding of unsustainable government deficit levels is a key question that G20 leaders must ask themselves when they meet in Pittsburgh later this month. Otherwise, Queen Elizabeth II and Detroit autoworkers will be asking again, all too soon, why no one saw it coming.