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EFE - Date: May 9, 2020
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WASHINGTON.- Unemployment in the United States soared in April to a rate of 14.7%, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic that has caused the destruction of more than 20 million jobs, the Labor Department said.
In one month, unemployment has gone from 4.4% in March to 14.7%, the largest increase in this indicator to date and places it at levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Last month, 20.5 million jobs were destroyed in the country in practically all sectors.
The most affected were the hotel and restaurant industry, with more than 7.6 million jobs destroyed; followed by retail, with 2.1 million jobs; and manufacturing with 1.3 million fewer jobs.
Tragic situation
The figures reveal the tragic situation of the labor market in the world’s leading economy.
The number of unemployed increased by 15.9 million to a total of 23.1 million, reflecting the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to contain the infections.
For his part, US President Donald Trump warned that the figure “is not a surprise” since the economy has had to be “artificially closed”, commenting on the data in an interview on the conservative Fox network.
TRUMP IS OPTIMISTIC
Activity has been paralyzed in the US since mid-March when extraordinary measures of confinement and restriction of mobility began to be applied due to the expansion of the coronavirus outbreak.
Trump, who has been eager to reopen the economy and has applauded the decision of some states to gradually lift these measures, said “all these jobs will return very soon” and said that next year will be “an incredible year”.
However, analysts believe that the May unemployment figure may be even higher and warned of the difficulty of recovering lost ground in the short term.
“We are not going to go down abruptly and go up abruptly. We fell quickly and will gradually go up, ”said Thomas Barkin, president of the Richmond Federal Reserve, on Thursday.
Massive injections
The US Federal Reserve (Fed) It has launched its entire monetary arsenal with massive injections of liquidity into the financial markets, massive purchases of debt, and has lowered interest rates to practically 0%, while Congress has approved several fiscal stimulus programs worth more than 2, 2 trillion dollars.
But the gravity of the situation is such that this does not seem sufficient.
“The challenge today is for the Federal Reserve and Congress to get ahead of this crisis as it unfolds. After a strong start, there is a great risk that they will be left behind and the abrupt stop of the economy will turn into a prolonged fall that would be ruinous, ”said James McCann, economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments, in a note to his clients.
The first calculation of the evolution of gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of the year registered a contraction of 4.8%, but the figures for the second quarter are expected to be even worse.
The United States reached this Friday the figure of 1,256,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and that of 75,781 deaths, according to the independent count of John Hopkins University, and is currently the central focus of the pandemic.
New York State remains the great epicenter of the virus in the United States with 26,144 deaths, followed by neighboring New Jersey with 8,807 deaths, Massachusetts with 4,552 deaths and the state of Illinois, which has reported 3,111 deaths.
Alfonso Fernández
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