Sure looks like the Recession has all but arrived, much to everyone's dismay, yet not unexpected, due to the sub-prime.  Wall Street had expected more jobs to be added in August but look what happened yesterday when it was reported that:

"…The reversal in employment, however, was far different from the gain of roughly 100,000 jobs that Wall Street had been expecting, raising worries that corporate profits and wage gains could weaken as the market upheaval moves beyond the housing and financial sectors." 

The New York Times reports that Unexpected Loss of Jobs Raises Risk of Recession and I wrote a long post recently on subprime lending, James J. Cramer's Bloody and Bloodier sub prime crisis which tries to figure out how the economy got into this mess and who's to blame for it.

"…“If the economy is not headed toward recession, it is very close to one,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. "

I also wrote about Housing Prices - Property Values which shows that housing values are going to drop like a Pannekoeken Pancake pretty soon and history of housing prices over the last century supports this development ..in other words, housing prices will drop, overall, drastically in the upcoming months and into next year and 2009.

Also, in Mortgage Market Mess - DM Confidential there's a lot of information about how the housing market meltdown is affecting lead generation.

According to the New York Times:

"…The Labor Department reported yesterday that 4,000 jobs were lost from July to August, and the deepest cuts were in industries that are connected to the housing market, like construction and manufacturing. It was the first employment decline since 2003, when the job market was still struggling to emerge from the slump after the 2001 recession.

The jobs report all but guarantees that the Fed will cut its benchmark short-term interest rate when its policy-making committee meets on Sept. 18. A quarter-point reduction, to 5 percent, remains the most likely move, although a half-point cut now cannot be ruled out, economists said.

The unexpected weakness in employment changed the terms of the debate over the health of the economy. Before the report was released, most economists were predicting that the economy had added about 100,000 jobs in August and that growth had slowed but continued.

But now, the odds of a recession in the next year have risen, to 25 to 50 percent, economists interviewed yesterday said. A recession is typically defined as an extended period in which the economy shrinks, leading to a rise in unemployment and a drop in consumer spending and business investment. "