A Mind-blowing Bad April Unemployment Report

The unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 14.7%. That is a 10.3 percentage point jump in a month and a record since the government has been keeping labor statistics, 1948.  While the jump is directly attributable to the Coronavirus, the decline in jobs is across the board.  Worse, the damage from Covad-19 is starting to be permanent.  It's so bad the graphs cannot adequately display the unemployment horror due to the scale.

 

unemployment rate

 

Payrolls show a complete disaster as jobs in America dropped by 20.5 million!

 

 

Leisure and Hospitality jobs dropped by almost half in a month, 47%.  That's 7.7 million jobs that went poof in the Covad-19 night.

 

 

Food and drink jobs by themselves dropped by 5.5 million in the dark cloud of April.

 

food service jobs

 

Even more frightening was the reported increase in temporary layoffs increased 10-fold according to the BLS or 18.1 million.

 

The labor participation rate plunged by 2.5% in one month and hasn't been this low since January 1973.  A 60.2% rate is really bad news and bear in mind we had the financial crisis in these statistics.

 

labor participation rate

 

Probably one of the worst statistics from the April Jobs report is how the number of permanent job losers increased by 544,000.  That's over half a million people who permanently lost their job as a direct result of the pandemic.  Other little darling stats are a record low employment to civilian population ratio, 51.3%.

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