The Great Recession continues. Here comes the second dip

It is not because of all the brouhaha over the debt ceiling though.

My day started with this BBC news that Apple has a lot more cash than what Uncle Sam has in the treasuries.  It is a staggering billions of dollars that Apple has.  It is yet another statistic on the jobless recovery we have experienced the last two years--corporate profits not translating to job creation.

Commentators like Robert Reich have worried enough about this for all of us.  As Alan Blinder put it forcefully, we have a national job emergency. 

The situation is getting uglier, not because of the US default possibilities but:

Whatever fear global investors may have about a potential U.S. debt default, it's being trumped for the moment by another fear: that the economy could be headed back into recession.
Money is pouring into Treasury notes and bonds Friday, driving yields down sharply, after the government said the economy grew at a dismally weak annualized rate of 1.3% last quarter -- below even the lousy 1.8% consensus estimate of economists.

Be really, really worried :(

John Cassidy in the New Yorker dares to say it:

I think it is fair to say that the dreaded “double dip” recession is at hand.

And Cassidy is not even "Dr. Doom" ... Cassidy writes:

what we are going through looks suspiciously like the beginnings of another recession. Payrolls, after growing at a monthly rate of more than two hundred thousand jobs earlier in the year, have essentially been flat since the end of April, and the unemployment rate has crept up from 8.8 per cent to 9.2 per cent. The sharp falloff in job growth was a development that very few economists predicted. 

The Economist summarizes it all:

Time to crawl into a cave and hibernate until the end of the elections in 2012.