The unemployment rate declined to 13.3 percent in May from 14.7 percent in April, the Labor Department said Friday, a surprising turnaround after months of job losses that was hailed as a sign that the economy is recovering more quickly than projected. The economy gained 2.5 million jobs in May as many states and counties began to reopen with the slowing of coronavirus cases nationwide. Yet the 30 million workers who are still collecting unemployment benefits show how significantly the labor market has been upended. The unemployment rate remains the worst since World War II.
“The idea you would see job gains and the unemployment rate falling was not something really that people were expecting,” said Jay Shambaugh, an economist at the Brookings Institution. “But a 13.3 percent unemployment rate is higher than any point in the Great Recession. It represents massive joblessness and economic pain. You need a lot of months of gains around this level to get back to the kind of jobs totals we used to have.”
Source: The Washington Post
No comments:
Post a Comment