Orange County Number 1 in Job Losses

The Orange County Register reports:

Oh, how we, the once mighty, have fallen.

Orange County, dead last in the jobs game. Worse than Michigan's shattered auto-factory towns. Worse than Florida's fizzled new villages. Worse than overbuilt, inland California.

The federal government's latest local job count, a tally that's late but relatively accurate and awfully insightful, found Orange County's job market down 19,100 positions in the year ended in the third quarter.That was the biggest decline of any of the 328 large U.S. counties tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A shocking comeuppance for a county that not too long ago – second quarter of 2004, to be exact – topped this very same list as the national champ in job creation.

You remember mid-2004, no? Local homes were appreciating at a 30 percent-a-year clip. Ameriquest, then the subprime loan king from O.C., had the cash and marketing sizzle to smack its name on a major league ballpark in Texas. "The O.C." was one of TV's hottest shows.

And the Federal Reserve, perhaps in a rare moment of clarity, noted that cycle of economic insanity with its first rate hike in four years.

Fast forward to early 2008. News that last year was a stinker should be, in many ways, no stunner.

We can safely predict housing prices are going even lower in Orange County.