Job Losses Bad News For NEO

The latest round of bad economic news arrived this week in the form of more job losses. If that isn't enough to bum you out then the impact of the downturn in NE Ohio will. George Zeller from the Center for Community Solutions spells out out the impending hard times for NEO in his latest information release:

In Ohio, our year over year job growth has been a loss for the last
12 consecutive months. It is likely that we will see the same in the
March 2008 figures when we get them on April 18.

Of course, we have no evidence at all that Ohio or Cuyahoga County
ever recovered at all from the 2000s recession. Thus, the new federal
figures today for the whole country are not a good sign for us
locally. We have now gone more than one quarter with job losses in
the USA. In another two months, unless job growth resumes, we will
have two quarters of national job losses. Even then, until the
Conference Board sees two negative quarters of GDP, they probably
will not declare an official recession. But, there is obvious
significant weakness in the national economy right now, and that is
very likely to spill over into our local situation.

Therefore, despite a lack of a local component in today's new
figures, the national employment figures are discouraging for us in
Ohio and in Cuyahoga County.

Zeller has had the unfortunate role of chronicling our economic woes. As he mentions we are already vulnerable due to the lack of a true recovery from the previous recession. The take away here is that the ebb and flow of the Dow Jones Index and Fed bailouts are only a small portion of the economic picture. These latest indicators point to adeep and troubling times for NE Ohioans.