American employers closed 598,000 jobs in January, marking the largest loss in the last 34 years, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor released on Friday.
Consequently, the unemployment rate in January reached 7.6 percent, highlighting the severity of the recession in the world’s largest economy. The latest figures greatly surprised economists on Wall Street, whose estimates ranged around 525,000 lost jobs and a corresponding unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. The January figures reflect the largest job loss since December 1974, when 602,000 people lost their jobs, while the unemployment rate reached its highest level in over 16 years.
"The sharp decline in employment in January results in a total of 3.6 million lost jobs since the onset of the recession in December 2007, with approximately half of them occurring in the last three months," noted Keith Hall, the commissioner of labor statistics at the U.S. Department of Labor. The latest sharp decline followed massive losses in the previous two months, with 577,000 jobs eliminated in December and 597,000 in November, according to the revised data from the U.S. Department of Labor. (H)
