• Approximately 1 million jobs were lost to simple fraud. These jobs were secretly transferred offshore to secure locations in the West Indies or Switzerland.
• Some 1.1 million Wall Street jobs disappeared into a swirling, hellish vortex that appeared briefly at the corner of Broadway and Whitehall.
• Retailers shed 800,000 jobs, with the biggest cut-backs at businesses selling crap, useless shit, worthless geegaws, and home furnishings.
• About 1.3 million jobs are believed to have never existed at all; they were actually part of an elaborate Ponzi scheme wherein people were "hired" to do "work" predicated on the "hiring" of more people. Sort of like Amway, or Human Resources.
• The remaining 200,000 job losses came in the fields of celebrity journalism (the long-anticipated Michael Jackson bounce has been slow to materialize), food styling, lifestyle coaching**, and enhanced interrogation.

*Based on the results of a Google search for "economists + sobriety" indexed with individuals' Yelp reviews.
**We don't know what this means, and no one would tell us.

Which Industries Were Hardest Hit?

The financial, construction, and automotive sectors suffered especially sharp job losses:

While other industries have proven fairly recession-proof:

Who's Hiring Now?

There is a silver lining: Market-watchers predict rising demand in the following fields:

• Peanut plant inspection
• Mob enforcement
• Vortex prevention
• Freelance plasma donation

The Bottom Line