On the newly released unemployment figures:

Marx used to speak about the “army of unemployed” as a creation of capitalists to keep wages low. What we have [today] is a peculiar army of the discouraged unemployed who have an effect on the numbers.
These are people who have given up looking for work, and, as a result, the number of the unemployed is reduced because they are considered out of the workforce. So there has been an increase in those numbers, a rather large one, and as a result the unemployment rate has dropped.
But on the other hand, when times improve, as they ultimately will, you’ll get a reduction in the discouraged unemployed, and that is going to artificially increase the number of the unemployed and it will make the numbers look worse.
So the actual unemployment rate is not that reliable.
In these [new] numbers there were two interesting hard numbers. There was an encouraging drop in the number of the underemployed, and that is people who want to be working full time but who have either part-time [jobs] or have diminished hours, and that number dropped by about a million, which was encouraging.
On the other hand, the number of those who haven’t had a job for over six months is now up to 6.3 million, a slight increase, which is the highest ever recorded.
It implies I think that those in certain sectors of the economy are not going to get jobs and [those sectors are] not going to return. On the other hand, in the cyclical elements of our economy, hiring is beginning again.

On the panic-buying and general hysteria as a massive snowstorm approached Washington:

Let me say, having woken up this morning in south Florida and flown into the teeth of this storm so that I could be here and defend truth, justice, and American way against Juan and his snow tie — I find the hysteria in Washington rather amusing.
But I think it’s rather useful. This is a dry run in Washington for Armageddon. I think when the real Armageddon happens, people in Washington will be relaxed. They’ll say: “Hey, dude, stay cool, this is just another snowstorm.”