recession

Citigroup posted a $5.1-billion loss and announced 9000 layoffs.

Analysts call it a "kitchen sink quarter." Companies in shell-shocked industries write down everything that even looks like it might go wrong, clearing the balance sheet for future growth. For banking, that quarter was supposed to be the end of last year. Friday's earning report from Citibank, however, indicates that some in the industry might still have faulty plumbing yet to expose. After giant write-downs last quarter, Citibank again announced it needed to revalue its assets sharply downward. The financial giant took massive write-downs across multiple business lines, pushing revenue into negative territory and causing its second consecutive quarterly loss. The bank has now written down almost $40 billion due to the credit crunch.

Unemployment jumped last month from 4.8% to 5.1%, as payrolls shed 80,000 jobs -- further evidence that the country is headed into recession, if it is not there already.

Should the government extend unemployment benefits? It usually doesn't, except in a recession, to cushion the impact on vulnerable households. With the labor market headed south, Congressional Democrats have brought up the possibility once again. President Bush, who wanted the focus kept on tax rebates, is still demurring, and on Tuesday, he asked Congress to give the existing stimulus package time to work.

A New York Times/CBS News poll finds that eighty-one percent of Americans think the country is now on the "wrong track."

That Americans are pessimistic isn't terribly surprising: The last year of the Bush Era feels like a cross between the final days of the Truman and the Carter Administrations, with a widely-disliked president presiding over an unpopular foreign war and a struggling economy -- a rare and understandably dispiriting combination. Still, the depths of the public's discouragement about America's prospects is striking, and one statistic in particular from the Times poll should be pasted on every political journalist's bulletin board: "Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off."