Recession Job Loss and Creation
Measuring the Impact of the Economic Downturn
After the long economic expansion that characterized much of the current decade, the Nation entered its eleventh postwar recession in December 2007. The unemployment rate, which is a lagging economic indicator, did not start to rise until May 2008 when it jumped 0.5 percentage points to 5.5 percent. By December 2008, it exceeded 7 percent, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Well over 600,000 jobs were lost in December 2008 — the biggest monthly decrease recorded by the BLS Current Employment Statistics program (CES) since December 1974, when another deep recession was taking place. The…
