The November payrolls number just came out, blowing away almost all estimates at a loss of 533,000 jobs in one month! The services sector, which had been holding up until only a couple of months ago, shed over half of those jobs.
September was also revised down to 403,000 job losses, and October was revised to 320,000 job losses, for a total of job losses in just 3 months of 1,250,000 jobs!
Job losses were the worst one month number since the depths of the (awful) 1974 oil-shock recession. Comparisons to the 1982 recession/depression are also being made.
The economy is in free-fall.
CNBC story, with updates, below in text.
Update 1:
Here is the CNBC story:
The Labor Department said the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent last month in the highest reading since 1993, compared with 6.5 percent in October, after widespread losses across the country's major industry sectors.
The number was far above analyst expectations.
"The only time I've experienced this was the second quarter of 1980 where we had the credit crunch, so rather than an erosion, you have an absolute shutdown," Robert Barbera, chief economist at ITG, said on CNBC. "This is a minus-8, minus-8.5 GDP kind of number."
November's job losses were the steepest since December 1974, when 602,000 jobs were shed,
The 1974 and 1980-82 recessions were the worst since the 1930s. We are already - and very suddenly - there.
The next comparison, unfortunately, will have to go back to the 1930s.
BTW, a "depression" (Update: found the link!) is generally thought to mean: (1) a lengthy decline of over one year, that (2) includes 10%+ unemployment, and (3) -10% GDP.
The Obama Administration is going to have to take FDR-like action, immediately.
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Update 2: Another snippet from the CNBC story:
The length of the workweek slipped to 33.5 hours, the shortest since records began in 1964, a Labor Department official said.
Average workweek is a leading indicator (the theory being, hours are cut before layoffs take place). This means that we can expect even further deterioration from here.
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Update 3: Here is a graph, courtesy of EconomiPic data, of the broader unemployment rate which now stands at 12.5%:
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Update 4: Bonddad says this means 37.5% of all jobs created during the Bush Administration have now been lost again. (Update 5: I've checked the BLS numbers, which are here. When Bush took office, there were 132.5 million jobs. The high for jobs was 138.1 million (the worst performance since the Great Depression, btw). With today's loss and revisions, it appears we are back at 136.0 million jobs. Just to keep even with population growth, we needed to add 150,000 a month, which in an 8 year period would have added up to ~147 million. An abysmal performance and an awful end).
P.S. This free fall started in September. That month, like the months of late 1929, will be studied for decades. I will post a "first draft of history" explaining what happened to cause a decline confined to Wall Street and housing borrowers to metastasize into general collapse this weekend. I am calling it "Black September."