From the New York Times this morning:
"Unemployment fell to 13.3 percent in May, with a gain of 2.5 million jobs.
"The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May, the Labor Department said Friday, an unexpected improvement in the nation’s job market.
"The unemployment rate fell from 14.7 percent in April, which was the highest since the government began keeping official statistics after World War II.
"Many economists expect that unemployment will begin to ease as states reopen and businesses call employees back to work. But it will take far longer for the economy to climb out of the hole than it did to fall into it."
- KC's View:
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Those gasps you hear are from all the economists who were expecting something far different, and now are struggling to explain the decline in the unemployment rate, especially in view of other data.
Maybe they should've been more optimistic about the immediate impact of all that stimulus money.
Maybe we've hit the low point and are bouncing back … but that may depend on whether we have a second wave of disease, and whether there is a corresponding economic decline.
We'll see. After all, economists only exist to make weather forecasters look good.
