By comparison, in the so-called “Great Recession” we lost only a fraction of those jobs, and we’re actually now adding jobs more quickly than major industrialized nations when they faced their own financial crises. And the jobs recovery would look a whole lot more robust if government employment were not still trending down (more private sector jobs are going to be created in the Obama’s first term than in Bush’s, for example).

From Calculated Risk’s Percent Job Losses: Great Recession and Great Depression :

On Friday, Treasury released a slide deck titled Financial Crisis Response In Charts. One of the charts shows the percentage jobs lost in the current recession compared to the Great Depression.

Here’s that graph:

As I noted in another post this morning, housing has been the big culprit in delaying this recovery, but we know from the recent history of industrialized nations that recoveries from financial crises are choppy and difficult.

We could have done a few things better to dig ourselves out of this mess, but it was always going to be a long slog. And it could have been a lot worse than it in fact turned out to be.

From Calculated Risk yesterday, State by state exports to Europe, which cites a Miami Herald article and a Wells Fargo study:

Utah has a very high percentage of exports to Europe – mostly silver and gold to the United Kingdom. West Virginia exports coal.

As the Miami Herald article notes, Florida will probably also be impacted by less tourism too.

However the largest potential impact is probably from financial contagion as opposed to trade and tourism.

Even though financial contagion is the biggest threat to the U.S., a European downturn would certainly hurt the U.S. economy. Take a look at the following map. Georgia is not in the tier of states at the most risk, but we would certainly feel the effects.