About four years into the supposed end of the Great Recession,  the proclaimed recovery of the U.S. economy remains one that is largely jobless, as well as being artificially goosed and propped up by massive bouts of monetary stimulus, known as quantitative easing, by the Federal Reserve. Thus, the April jobs report has been heralded as great news by pundits, claiming that the American economy that month created 288,000 net new jobs, and that the official unemployment rate has declined to 6.3 percent. Sounds like good economic news-but not so fast.

The economics correspondent for the British newspaper The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, has waded into the details of official employment and workplace participation statistics in the United States, and found that in fact the non-farm workforce in the U.S. actually declined by 806,00 in April and overall labor participation in the U.S. has declined to a miserable 62.8 percent of the population. Thus, it is able-bodied men and women who have left the labor force due to discouragement that has driven down the unemployment rate, and not new job creation. The U.S. economy, which officially grew by a measly 0.1 percent in the last quarter (essentially no-growth),  is still dependent on massive monetary stimulus and large government deficits. Meanwhile, monetary stimulus is losing its economic punch, while distorting the economy through the creation of massive asset bubbles. The Fed recognizes this, and is well into its tapering back of quantitative easing.

From every perspective, the American economy does not look nearly as good as it is being described in official circles, and ditto for much of the rest of the world, still mired in the great global economic crisis.

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Just in the past week, economic media pundits as diverse as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who writes for The New York Times, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the international business editor for the British newspaper, the Telegraph, have warned that the United States is already in the initial phases of an economic depression. Their chilly characterization of the U.S. economy after more than a year of the Obama stimulus, preceded by TARP, is sterile is its uninhibited gloominess.

In the case of Paul Krugman, his focus is on the disastrous unemployment rate in America, and his conviction that fiscal crisis and deficits be damned, the U.S. must borrow and spend whatever it takes to drive down the unemployment rate, or face an even more grave economic emergency. As I have stated before, while I concur with Krugman’s description of the American economy, I don’t think his prescription is supportable, based on the mathematical realities and the fact that excessive private debt sparked the global financial and economic crisis.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s most recent column had the melancholy headline, “With the U.S. trapped in depression, this really is starting to feel like 1932.” He lays out the case for why the U.S. is in the throes of a depression; dismal home and retail sales, collapsing state budgets and the resulting fiscal cuts abetting even more bad economic indicators. In his eyes, the only hope are the central banks engaging in another round of quantitative easing (being dubbed by some as QE 2) and debt monetization, the inevitable inflation actually being preferable to a deflationary spiral.

What is clear from reading these two esteemed economic observers is that very intelligent economists are losing hope over the state of the U.S. economy (which also means the global economy) and in their despair are grasping at extraordinary policy measures that are likely to further exacerbate all the macro-economic indicators they are rightfully perturbed by. The concluding comments in Evans-Pritchard’s column sum up the dire gloom that permeates his appreciation of the situation:

“Perhaps naively, I still think central banks have the tools to head off disaster. The question is whether they will do so fast enough, or even whether they wish to resist the chorus of 1930s liquidation taking charge of the debate. Last week the Bank for International Settlements called for combined fiscal and monetary tightening, lending its great authority to the forces of debt-deflation and mass unemployment. If even the BIS has lost the plot, God help us.”