The Briefing Room
General Category => Economy/Business => Topic started by: mystery-ak on May 08, 2020, 01:25:03 pm
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US unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent as economy loses 20.5 million jobs
By Sylvan Lane - 05/08/20 08:32 AM EDT
The U.S. lost 20.5 million jobs in April amid the economic devastation of the coronavirus pandemic as the steepest recorded surge in American unemployment nearly wiped out a decade of job gains, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The unemployment rate spiked to 14.7 percent from 4.4 percent in March, according to the April jobs report, as thousands of businesses closed and laid off or furloughed workers they could no longer afford to employ. The one-month rise in the unemployment rate between March and April is the largest ever recorded by BLS.
April’s staggering job losses also shattered records for both the largest one-month decline in jobs — roughly 2 million in September 1945 — and the highest level of unemployment ever recorded by BLS of 10.8 percent in November 1982. The jobs lost in April alone are almost 2.5 times the 8.7 million jobs lost during the Great Recession and nearly equal to the 22.4 million jobs gained in the decade of recovery that followed.
Between March’s revised loss of 870,000 jobs and April’s record-breaking plunge, the U.S. has lost roughly 21.4 million jobs since the spread of COVID-19 upended American life and derailed a resilient economy.
more
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/496723-us-unemployment-rate-spikes-to-xx
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Nearly Half of Americans Are Out of Work as Employment-Population Ratio Crashes to Lowest Level Ever
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/05/08/just-over-half-of-americans-are-working-as-employment-population-ratio-crashes-to-lowest-level-ever/ (https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2020/05/08/just-over-half-of-americans-are-working-as-employment-population-ratio-crashes-to-lowest-level-ever/)
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Stock markets are optimistic -- Dow Jones up 455pts. today...
(but what happens there doesn't necessarily reflect what's happening to the ordinary American...)
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It's a wait and see right now; states are opening up and people are going back to work. Logically it would seem that in a couple of months we should see unemployment numbers dwindle.
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Stock markets are optimistic -- Dow Jones up 455pts. today...
(but what happens there doesn't necessarily reflect what's happening to the ordinary American...)
This surprises me ... people are betting on things returning back to "normal". I think it's a little too early to dismiss the damage done to the economy ... we just added trillions to our debt with the DEMS pushing for handing out yet another stimulus to everyone.