How is that Hope and Change working out for you?

Nothing like fixing the economy and creating shovel-ready jobs for everyone. From Marketwatch:

Payrolls shrunk another half million in May, survey says
ISM expected to rise to 42%, still 'squarely' in recession territory

The economy likely shed another 500,000 jobs in May, the seventh straight month with at least a half million jobs lost, including 539,000 in April, analysts surveyed by MarketWatch said. The unemployment rate probably jumped from 8.9% to 9.2%, the highest since 1983.

The Labor Department will release the May employment report on Friday at 8:30 a.m. It's the biggest economic release in a week chock full of data covering every sector of the economy.

In "normal circumstances," such heavy job losses "would be seen as very bad news," wrote Brian Bethune and Nigel Gault, economists at IHS Global Insight. But these times are anything but normal.

Investors "may be encouraged that the pace of job losses appears to be slowing -- albeit marginally," wrote Meny Grauman, an economist for CIBC World Markets. It would be the smallest monthly job loss since 380,000 were lost in October in the wake of the financial panic that followed the collapse of Lehman Bros.

If the economists are right, U.S. nonfarm payrolls fell to 131.9 million in May, down 6.2 million since December 2007 and the lowest payroll count since August 2000. All of the job growth since the 2001 recession has been wiped out, and then some.

The ISM mentioned in the second headline is an economic metric published by the Institute for Supply and Management:

Manufacturing ISM
The factory sector is still mired in its deepest downturn since the end of World War II, but, once again, the pace of decline appears to be moderating. The Institute for Supply Management index should rise slightly in May to 42% from 40.1%, economists said.

The ISM will be released on Monday at 10 a.m. Eastern.

At 42%, the ISM would remain "squarely in recession territory," said Wachovia's economists. "However, the recent increases corroborate the notion that economic recovery will begin late this year."

The ISM bottomed at a 28-year low of 32.9% in December, and has been marching higher steadily since.

The ISM is computed from a survey of purchasing managers at manufacturing firms. Instead of asking them how many widgets they sold, the ISM asks them if they sold more widgets this month than last.

The resulting survey tells us how broadly based the downturn is among companies, not how deep the downturn is. Any reading under 50% in the ISM shows that business is still getting worse (or getting no better) for most manufacturing companies.

So in order to "bail us out" of a recession, our government nationalizes the larger banks, takes over the reigns of our big three auto makers and forces us into more than one Trillion Dollars in debt. Doing nothing and letting the big businesses readjust would accomplish the same thing at a much lower cost and it would euchre the Unions out of their position of power in Detroit. This is not what I voted for...