2-job-graphs“Sex in the City”–type handbag obsessions are so mid-2007. The accessory of the moment is the handbasket — instead of Gucci, think Dante. It’s not whether we’re entering a depression; it’s all about getting there in style. The latest jobless charts compare our fashion-downward economy with past recessions in bright spring colors and clean descending lines.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s chart features a plummeting job-loss line (direct from the  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics) in an olive green, set against red and blue for the past two economic recessions.

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UPDATE: This chart and others like it have been called out as graphically deceptive for not taking into account changes in the size of the workforce. Check out a corrected version in a range of colors worthy of the wires inside a phone cable at calculatedriskblog.com.

Who better than the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research to provide the statistics for this chart by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, updated from last month (see earlier post) to show our current unemployment line in red now crossing the median (in teal) for the last 10 recessions. The harshest recession data is in periwinkle, the mildest in an olive drab.

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Both charts also come in large:

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