April US Jobless Rate Triples
to Historic 14.7 Percent The Labor Department released
April's numbers on Friday. 20.5 million jobs were
lost during that month. It is the most significant decline since
the Great Depression in 1933, before the
department began keeping record of job losses. The numbers dwarf the
8.7 million job losses of the
Great Recession in 2009. Ryan Sweet, Moody's Analytics, via Bloomberg The silver lining to the
historically devastating numbers is
that 78.3 percent of Americans classified
their job loss as a temporary layoff. Economic analysts say that
following past recessions,
high temporary layoffs equated to a faster
recovery once the economy stabilized. Should the economy worsen,
temporary layoffs have the potential
to become permanent.