Employment’s Recovery Road Comes to an End

The Great Recession

Jobs didn’t get much worse in September, but they stopped getting better.
This is a tale of where the recovery road for the US economy ended. Unemployment is the crux of the Covidcrisis economic story. While jobs showed a little improvement in September, a little digging through the numbers reveals the return to full employment has started a turn toward the worse. (Not as bad as “worst,” but “worse” than May-July.)

The two warmest parts of the economy during the September calm that I wrote about in my last article (“A September to Remember“) were the job market and the housing market. I promised to cover those in detail in separate articles because they are more important than the other currents I brought up and more complex to where the headline numbers don’t quite lay out an accurate picture. In this article, I’ll uncover what lies below the surface of the employment numbers.

Let us dig deeper into the slightly positive jobs reports of September

At the start of September, MarketWatch gave the first hints that the jobs recovery was waning:

‘What’s concerning is that the pace of jobs growth is slowing down’ — economists react to August jobs report

The August jobs report on Friday showed the coronavirus-battered U.S. economy recovered 1.4 million jobs last month, with the unemployment rate falling to 8.4% from 10.2%….

“Yes we’ve added large numbers the last few months, but still digging out of a very big hole.” — Martha Gimbel, economist at Schmidt Futures….

“What’s concerning is that the pace of jobs growth is slowing down. If we had nothing but months like Aug going forward, it’d take another 8 months to get back to Feb levels, and longer to get back to our pre-COVID trajectory.” — Ernie Tedeschi, economist at Evercore ISI….

“Unemployment breaking the 10% barrier so decisively is a big psychological lift … . The hiring of Census workers significantly added to jobs, but there were other key gains in the hard-hit retailing sector. Unfortunately, the easier jobs gains are over, and now we’ll be battling permanent layoffs once thought to be temporary, bankruptcies, secondary layoffs and maybe major layoffs in the airline industry. Expect that starting this month we’ll struggle to drop the unemployment rate as much, and possibly see break-even jobs months and even backsliding.” — Robert Frick, corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union.

MarketWatch