More jobs were lost in September than were lost in August, as the Labor Department revised the August decline to 201,000 jobs from the 216,000 it initially reported. In addition, last month the average workweek edged down by one-tenth of an hour, to 33 hours, meaning that those who do work are not getting as many hours.

For those who are unemployed, the job market looks worse now than at any point in the recession. The number of people who have been jobless for more than six months increased in September by 450,000, reaching a whopping 5.4 million.

When you add in those workers whose hours have been reduced, and others who have become so discouraged they have stopped looking, the unemployment rate jumps to 17 percent. That is the highest level since the government began tracking “underemployment” in 1994 and is a massive number by anyone’s standards.

Can anyone say “jobless recovery”?

The hypothesis that a recession will return after an initial recovery was made by U.S. economist Nouriel Roubini, professor at the University of New York.

Roubini was the among the first economists to identify the U.S. credit crisis which degenerated into a global crisis. He said recently on a forum that the risk of a recession in the second stage is large.

The United States experienced such situation in 1937. When the Federal Reserve cut credit lines, fearing inflation after the Great Depression of 1929, the economy fell a further 3.4%.

“A dual failure would cause an abrupt decrease in activity, and could lead to resumption of protectionism by states due to internal social pressures,” said Eswar Prasad, professor Cornell University.

Opinions on the recession scenario are divided into two camps. While some economists think this hypothesis is possible, others consider it premature to consider a new collapse, given that only a few economies have announced an end of the current recession.

“Despite a categorically improved economic outlook, it is not clear, for now, if the period of stability will continue. This could have this year, negative effects on the labor market “, says a report from the German ministry.

Germany recovered in the second quarter from the most severe recession since the Second World War, with an unexpected economic growth of 0.3%, confirming the effectiveness of government incentive programs.

With the banking system still fragile, analysts warned the optimism caused by the positive GDP could be unwarranted, drawing attention to the low growth rate, of the fragility of the banking system, the plight of the labor market and the decline in consumption.

The use of the programs to reduce the working week moderated the growth in the number of unemployed in Germany, where unemployment rose by only 300,000 people since the financial crisis began in September 2008.

The government estimates that the economy will shrink by 6% this year, but growth in the second quarter could improve the projection.

“The country will have to face the side effects of huge doses of money medicine that continue to be managed,” Buffett warned in an editorial published by the New York Times.

The net debt of the United States is growing and will increase in fiscal year 2009-2010, with a one percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per month, and will reach 56% of GDP in July next year , from 41% of GDP now.

According to Buffett, once the U.S. economy starts to recover, Congress and the government must end the growing public debt to GDP ratio and begin to keep the obligations it assumes at a commensurate level of available resources.

Recovery of exports is a good sign for the largest economy in the EU, a country that remains the largest exporter in the world, even ahead of China.

However, the trade surplus in the first half of 2009, amounting to 57.8 billion, is 44.8% lower than in the same period of 2008. Industrial production registered a slight decline of 0.1% in June, which led to the decrease over the second quarter to be only 0.8%.

From the period January to March, production had a significant decline of -18%, according to economists Jennifer McKeown at Capital Economics. Germany seems to be recovering slowly from this recession. However, there are still some risks that may arise at the end of economic recovery programs.

Critics charge that, in order to gain as large a bonus as possible, bankers took short-term risks and created highly complex banking products which subsequently proved to be fatal for banks and the banking system as a whole.

However, a study by two American professors shows a more complex situation. The study conducted by René Stulz and Rüdiger Fahlenbrach of Ohio State University comes at a time when the debate on the pay of bankers is again in sight of regulators.

The study showed that most bank presidents and directors had large amount of shares in the banks they worked for. If these individuals had perceived a coming economic danger, it stands to reason they would have sold shares en masse before the crisis hit. However, according to the study, nearly all the heads of major U.S. banks have lost a minimum than 30 million dollars, and many much more than this.

So are the large bonuses and the overall incentive structure to blame for the banking meltdown? While one could certainly argue that the search for short-term profit at any cost was a factor, the truth is that bankers were just as incentivized to maintain the long term share prices of the banks they worked at. They simply made bad decisions.

The U.S. economy has contracted in the second quarter with 1%, below estimates, as the decline of business and investment in the residential sector was tempered significantly, according to government data published Friday, showing a mitigating of recession.

Obama has also said that data on unemployment, which will be published next week, will show that a large number of Americans remain without jobs.

“It will take many months until we get out of the recession that is deeper than we imagined” Obama said in his weekly radio broadcast and on the Internet. He added that economic recovery will not occur as long as jobs continue to be shed.

So while green shoots may be appearing in greater numbers, we can’t call ourselves out of the recession until job growth start to pick up.

In the first three months of this year alone, Lithuania’s economy declined by 13.3%. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are affected by a deep recession due to severely declining of property values, tightening credit conditions and reduced exports.

The three states that between 2004 and 2006 had the highest rates of development from EU are currently facing the steepest drop among emerging economies, according to the latest World Bank report.

SEB AB, the largest bank in Lithuania and Swedbank, the largest bank in Estonia and Latvia, is facing huge losses from bad loans. Both banks reported net losses in the second quarter because of that and reduced the volume of new loans.

“Economic decline is very fast, but we expect macroeconomic indicators to improve in the second half of the year,” said agency Bloomberg Vilija Tauraite , economist at SEB Bank. The “hard landing” of the economies of the Baltic states has been anticipated by the rating agencies, the IMF and the World Bank since 2007.

In comparison, in May, the unemployment rate was above 10 percent in 13 states plus the District of Columbia.

The unemployment rate of 15.2 percent registered by the state of Michigan in June is the largest in the U.S., but the record for this state was 16.9 percent in November 1982. However, U.S. Labor Department emphasized that it for the first time in the past 25 years since a U.S. registered an unemployment rate above 15 percent. West Virginia reached this level in 1984.

At the national level, the unemployment rate lies at 9.5 percent, the highest point in the past 26 years. Economists estimate that by the end of the year the nation’s jobless rate will pass 10 percent.

There were some bright spots, however. Construction of new U.S. homes rose in June at the highest level in the last seven months, and the number of building permits issued also recorded an upward trend, a sign that the construction industry is climbing out of the current crisis.

What was surprising for banks was the trigger time and the scale of crisis, says Demyanyk. “Most likely, the crisis was not surprising, but its magnitude and time were,” the economist insists.

Since the start of the crisis, several studies have shown that banks were aware at one time that the situation would get rid of control. Two months ago, The Center of Public Integrity published a report which showed that “Mega-banks that have financed the sub-prime industry were not victims of the financial system collapse, as they say. “

These banks were deliberately facilitating financing home loans which now threaten the financial system, the report shows.