Honestly horrifying... The April Jobs Report. A jaw-dropping 20.5M Americans lost their jobs last month, bringing the unemployment rate to 14.7%. Just a year ago it was 3.6%. And we thought the 870K jobs we lost in March was bad...
- It's the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression in 1933, when unemployment hit 25% — it's also the greatest job loss (by far) since the gov began tracking monthly job gains/losses in 1939.
- 8.7M jobs were lost during the '08 financial crisis — in the decade after that, US employers added 22.8M jobs to the economy. The COVID-19 crisis wiped out ten years of job gains in just a month. And probably more...
- People are only considered unemployed when they're actively searching for a new job — many aren't right now, partly because many companies aren't hiring and the stay-at-home orders. If you include these people, the unemployment rate is probably more like 23%.
But Wall Street is popping bottles... The stock market saw the unemployment numbers and barely flinched:
- The Nasdaq recovered all its 2020 losses and is up over 30% since its low on March 23 — the tech-heavy index is now higher than its December 2019 value.
- The S&P 500 — the index which measures the stock prices of the largest 500 US companies — has soared 31% since March 23 (so has the Dow).