Via the Voice of America:

Austan Goolsbee spoke on Fox News Sunday:

"It is going to be a rough patch [difficult period], not just in the immediate term, but for a little bit of time [in the future]," he said. "You have to turn the economy around, and jobs and job growth tends to come after you turn the economy around."

But Friday's employment news was not all bad. Although the U.S. jobless rate continues to spike higher, the actual number of Americans who lost jobs during the month was the smallest since last September, the fourth consecutive month in which the pace of job losses slowed.

How can the unemployment rate continue to rise sharply while job losses are growing milder? Goolsbee says recent indicators showing improvement in some sectors of the U.S. economy are encouraging Americans who had stopped looking for work to re-enter the job market. With a larger pool of workers comes higher unemployment when the economy continues to shed jobs.

Here's an interesting graphic on the jobs situation across the country: The Geography of Jobs. If you run the graphic, you'll find the downturn in employment began in the Detroit MSA in early 2006. Though the rest of the country remain largely immune that began to change in late 2007 and early 2008. By then, the country was clearly headed for a recession.

Now what worries me is that the median unemployment length is creeping up. As of May, it was 14.9 weeks compared to 12.5 weeks in April. Fifty percent of unemployed have been so over 15 weeks. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 268,000 over the month to 3.9 million and has tripled since the start of the recession.

I would expect the Administration to consider another fiscal stimulus in the Fall because the current one is likely to fail in jump starting the economy. Earlier this week, World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned policy makers that fiscal-stimulus plans are insufficient to turn around the "real economy" and rising joblessness threatens to set off political unrest across the globe.

"While the stimulus has given an impulse, it's like a sugar high unless you eventually get the credit system working," Zoellick said in an interview yesterday with Bloomberg Television's Political Capital with Al Hunt. "When unemployment increases, that's probably the most political combustible issue."

While Mr. Zoellick's comments were about the global economy, they aptly fit the American economy. In short, economists like Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini are being proved right.