According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, the Labor Department is expected to release a report today showing the unemployment rate rising to 7.9 percent with a loss of 648,000 jobs in February.
The article said:
Employers likely slashed a net total of 648,000 jobs last month, according to economists’ forecasts. If they are right, it would mark the worst month of job losses since the recession started in December 2007. It also would represent the single biggest month of job reductions since October 1949, when the country was just pulling out of a painful recession, although the labor force has grown significantly since then.
Businesses have implemented job losses at a fast and furious pace in their efforts to avoid massive profit losses from this recession. Fear and real losses in all industries is creating a frenzy of job losses that will send unemployment skyrocketing to even higher numbers. Already in some areas unemployment has surpassed 10 percent with job losses in the hundreds of thousands.
Basically the economy is in a tailspin and we have very little power to control what happens next. Our greatest hope is to prepare ourselves for the inevitable fallout by making sure that we protect our most vulnerable citizens from consequences of job losses and foreclosures by approving and supporting legislation that helps Americans handle the massive amounts of debts many have accumulated over the past 10 years.
The economy has already contracted 6.2 percent in the final quarter of 2008 and it is expected to continue to shrink in 2009 and maybe even 2010. The contraction will surely create more job losses, foreclosures and an unemployment rate we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. Let’s not be caught by surprise.