Economy Loses a Staggering 533,000 Jobs in November

The 533,000 single month job loss is the most in 34 years, while the unemployment rate is a 15 year high. The numbers emphasize what the government told us on Monday: the United States is in recession. This is what it means: U.S. Loses 20K Jobs A Day.

Wall Street dropped in response, but it did not cartwheel downhill uncontrollably: the DJIA and NASDAQ are both down over 2% at the time of this writing, with the S&P 500 down 2.5%.

Economists had been forecasting a much smaller payroll reduction of 350,000 jobs.

"These numbers are shocking," said economist Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economics Advisors. "Companies are sharply reacting to the economy's problems and slashing costs. They are not trying to ride it out."

"This is almost indescribably terrible," wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics. "The pace of job losses is accelerating alarmingly."

Overall, the job losses in 2008 now total more than 1.9 million. Most of these cutbacks have come in the last three months as a response to the worsening economic and credit crisis.

You can read the full government report here.

Here is the Unemployment report summary.

Nonfarm payroll employment fell sharply (-533,000) in November, and the unemployment rate rose from 6.5 to 6.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. November's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October, as revised. Job losses were large and widespread across the major industry sectors in November.

Unemployment (Household Survey Data)

Both the number of unemployed persons (10.3 million) and the unemploy-ment rate (6.7 percent) continued to increase in November. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, as recently announced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the number of unemployed persons increased by 2.7 million, and the unemployment rate rose by 1.7 percentage points.

The unemployment rates for adult men (6.5 percent) and adult women (5.5 percent) continued to trend up in November. The unemployment rates for teenagers (20.4 percent), whites (6.1 percent), blacks (11.2 percent), and Hispanics (8.6 percent) showed little change over the month. The jobless rate for Asians was 4.8 percent in November, not seasonally adjusted.

Among the unemployed, the number of persons who lost their job and did not expect to be recalled to work increased by 298,000 to 4.7 million in November.

Over the past 12 months, the size of this group has increased by 2.0 million.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 2.2 million in November, but was up by 822,000 over the past 12 months.

According to CNN "November's report provided the first glimpse at how employers reacted after the peak of the credit crisis, reached in mid-October. With credit largely unavailable and expensive, consumers scaled back their spending, dragging down manufacturing and construction businesses."