Obama's Jobs Plan Had Better Work

Updated from 1:38 p.m. EST

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President-elect Barack Obama has promised that once he's in office, job creation will be among his top priorities, and at the rate employment is declining a solution can't come soon enough.

Of course, at this point, market participants can't be sure Obama's proposed recovery plan will stop the bleeding. The December employment report, released Friday, may not have been as weak as some had feared, but it still showed that more than half a million workers were put on the streets last month. Further workforce reductions will likely pressure nonfarm payrolls reports for at least the first few months of 2009.

The Labor Department said that the U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in the final month of 2008, and the unemployment rate jumped to 7.2%, a 16-year high. Prior to the report, worse-than-expected ADP employment data, which indicated that 693,000 private-sector jobs were lost in December, had investors fearing a far greater loss in the government numbers.

Despite the fact that December's decline in employment wasn't as severe as many anticipated, a short reprieve in job-cut announcements courtesy of the Christmas and New Year holidays may have only delayed workforce cuts.

Several companies have already announced plans to eliminate jobs, and we're only one week into 2009. Alcoa (AA), Schlumberger (SLB), Halliburton (HAL), Walgreen (WAG), World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Boeing (BA) and Meredith (MDP), among others, recently announced staff reductions.

With the fourth-quarter earnings season about to kick off, there's considerable fear that more firings and layoffs are looming.

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