US looses 7.9 million jobs
Financial crisis wiped out 7.9 million jobs in US. But that’s not the worst. Most of the jobs are likely to never come back, experts say.
The government jobs report issued Friday shows that businesses have slowed their pace of hiring to a relative trickle says recent CNN report.
“The job losses during the Great Recession were so off the chart, that even though we’ve gained about 600,000 private sector jobs back, we’ve got nearly 8 million jobs to go,” said Lakshman Achuthan, managing director of Economic Cycle Research Institute.
US looses 7.9 million jobs
More frequent recessions: Despite signs of slowing economic growth, Achuthan is not predicting that the U.S. economy is about to fall into another downturn later this year.
“We’ve entered a era where the United States will see more frequent recessions than anyone is used to,” Achuthan said.
One of the big problems is that many of workers who have lost jobs were in industries that are not likely to recover their former strength.
“We’ve got the wrong people in the wrong place with the wrong skills,” said John Silvia, chief economist with Wells Fargo Securities. He said construction workers in California or Florida and auto workers in Michigan will have to relocate and retrain to find new jobs.
“As many as half the people who lost their jobs will have to find something else to do,” said Silvia.
The unemployment rate is currently 9.5%. A return to the 4.4% rate it was the summer before the recession started in 2007 is out of reach.
In fact, the Federal Reserve, in its latest forecast, predicts that unemployment will stay around 7% or above through 2012, and in the 5% to 5.3% range in the long-run.
