Uh oh.

Hewlett-Packard said it is laying off 9,000 people.

As a follow-up to yesterday's rant, I see that investors are applauding the moves of European governments to reduce their budget deficits, as if the answer to deflation is more deflation.

Hasn't anyone ever heard of Keynes and the false dawn of 1937?

Don't look for small businesses to lead the economic recovery.

The monthly reading from the National Federation of Independent Business Index of Small Business Optimism clearly shows little optimism among small business.

Most eyes will be on the monthly employment numbers when they are reported on Friday. Especially on the heels of last month's report, which showed the economy adding 162,000 jobs in March, the largest increase in three years.

Afterall, a growing number of economic indicators point to a recovering economy. Yet, most experts agree we cannot declare a full-fledged recovery until the unemployment rate falls significantly from its current level of nearly 10 percent.

By this point, press cheerleading for the economy is hardly newsworthy, and I'm not the first to notice the latest example.

But the down-is-up spin on Caterpillar's results cannot escape mention.  As the Business Insider notes, the Bloomberg story is tame by comparison with the ravings on CNBC yesterday.

It looks like the unemployment rate is going to remain stubbornly high at near the 10% rate for awhile. This is the conclusion of two studies released Tuesday.

For example, 73 percent of employers told Manpower they have no plans to hire people in the second quarter of this year. This sentiment is unchanged from the survey conducted three months ago.

Finally, a deficit hawk gets it.

Former Comptroller General David Walker, now CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Institute, has co-written an op-ed with the Lawrence Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, in which they agree that federal budget deficits must rise in the short term so the government can take more aggressive measures to boost employment.

I've been scratching my head over some of the debates going on about the application of Keynesian economics to our situation.

On the one hand, many if not most Republicans argue that Keynesian demand-side stimulus is ineffective, but then embrace its thrust (not to mention the goverment funds) when they push for tax cuts.

I searched in vain through news reports over the weekend for an explanation of how unemployment could decline in January, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent, when job losses grew, albeit by only 20,000.

Surely, I thought, the explanation lay in a decline in the labor force because unemployed workers had given up looking, which is the usual explanation for a decline in unemployment that's accompanied by more job losses.

The folks at CareerBuilder are desperately trying to put a positive spin on the dismal job market.

In a press release Wednesday the online employment firm celebrated the "resiliency" of Americans by pointing out the fact that 58 percent of those laid off in the last 12 months have found new positions. Nice try, guys.