I have been paying a fair amount of attention to the NIH meltdown because of the time I spent up at NBER, but not a whole lot to current goings on in the physical sciences. This interesting graph from the AIP tells me that there are some problems there, too. The percentage of new physics PhDs going into potentially permanent positions at graduation fell from ~50% to ~25% between 2000 and 2004. That's approaching the all-time low of 20% of 1993, probably the worst time ever to be a new physics PhD.

When asked, though, these postdocs claim that the positions are to advance their educations, not because they can't find a permanent job.

Maybe this is just part of academia's move to a tenure-free workforce, but that seems unlikely. I'm guessing a shift to smaller numbers of larger grants from NSF is part of the story - something for the to-investigate pile.