The numbers are dropping….
But?
They ARE still VERY high….
And?
With the winter coming ?
Will virus restriction’s be coming back that could shut down parts of the economy again ?
Are you, by nature, an optimist or a pessimist? Either way, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has some numbers for you.
That is the reality of the October employment report, which on Friday showed genuine evidence that the economy is healing from its pandemic-induced collapse last spring, but also scars suggesting that the harm it did may linger for a long time to come.
To start with the happier signs: Employers added 638,000 jobs in October, and that number was held back because the Census Bureau cut 147,000 temporary positions as it wound down its once-a-decade count. If you exclude those losses, the 785,000 net jobs added represent an acceleration from the rate of job gains in September, and at that adjusted rate the economy would return to pre-pandemic levels in 13 more months.
The share of Americans who say they are working rose by 0.8 of a percentage point, a sharp improvement both in terms of its level and in terms of the pace of improvement. The employment-to-population ratio rose only 0.1 of a percentage point in September.
And the unemployment rate fell by a full percentage point to 6.9 percent, a steeper drop than any single month in the 71 years of employment data stretching from 1948 to 2019. (There have been three other months in the pandemic recovery this year with steeper declines.)…
…
If, on the other hand, you take a more dour approach, there is a lot of reason to worry about the ways the economy is still deeply broken — and about the signs that healing will not be a speedy process, especially if the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen over the winter, as appears likely.