Unemployment Rates Rise for Second Month

The Labor Department also revised its unemployment numbers from October to a loss of 468,000 jobs, the biggest one-month job loss since May 1980.

Manufacturing, transportation and services reported the greatest payroll cuts, although all industries except finance, reported losses. The guard and security services sector, however, gained some 29,000 jobs in October and November.

The unemployment rate among blacks jumped three percentage points since last year, reaching 10.9 percent last month.

These recent statistics further diminish economists’ hopes that the U.S. could quickly recover from its current recession by this spring.

Experts project the unemployment rate could climb as high as 6.5 percent by the summer, though that would still be lower than the 7.5 percent unemployment rate during the 1990-1991 recession.

The Federal Reserve is expected to lower short-term interest rates by another quarter point when it meets next Tuesday. The Fed has lowered interest rates ten times this year, by a total of 4 percentage points, to 2 percent.

President Bush called the sharp increase in layoffs “troubling” and urged Congress to quickly pass an economic stimulus package that favors corporate tax cuts and personal income tax rebates.

“The most important thing we can do for unemployed workers and those concerned about their jobs is to get the economy growing,” the president said in a statement today.

The Senate has postponed hearings on the economic stimulus bill until next week, with some Democrats pushing for more assistance to lower-income and unemployed Americans.

Stocks dipped slightly in response to the latest economic statistics, but the Dow Jones Industrial Average managed to remain above the 10,000-point benchmark, closing today at 10,049.

Over 1.9 million Americans lost their jobs since January 2001, with the majority of those layoffs coming in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 800,000 of those jobs were cut following the Sept. 11 attacks.