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Jobless Rate Spikes in October

240,000 jobs lost; Unemployment at 6.5 percent

By Mark Huffman
ConsumerAffairs.com

November 7, 2008

Personal Finance • Staying Healthy in a Sick Economy • Consumer Confidence Sinks to Historic Low • How Retirees Can Survive the Bear Market • Are Men Hardwired to Overspend? • Shopping Poll Holds Bad News for Retailers • 533,000 Jobs Lost in November • Feds Report More Signs of Recession • Consumer Confidence Rebounds in November • Cheap Oil May Be Economic Stimulus • Job Security Lacking This Holiday Season • An Upside to the Down Market: A Lower Tax Bill • Americans Tap Savings to Cope with Economy • Economists' Panel Sees Prolonged Recession --- • More Personal Finance News

Somehow, the October employment report was even worse than expected, and economists were braced for some really bad news. They got it.

The nation's unemployment rate jumped from 6.1 percent in September to 6.5 percent, as companies eliminated 240,000 jobs during the month. It was the largest one-month job loss in nearly seven years.

To make matters worth, the U.S. Labor Department revised the September job loss numbers, showing they were even worse. More than 284,000 jobs were lost during the month, according to the revised report. When you add August, September and October together, 651,000 U.S. jobs vanished in a three-month period.

Strangely enough, Wall Street rallied in the immediate aftermath of the dreadful jobs report, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising more than two percent, following two days of heavy losses. Analysts said it might have little to do with the jobs numbers, which everyone expected to be bad, and more to do with expectations that President-elect Obama will quickly name a Treasury Secretary, perhaps as early as today.

Obama is huddling with his economic team to discuss a strategy for dealing with the nation's financial crises, which could be worse by the time he takes office in January. Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration and on the short list to hold that job in the Obama Administration, says the transition team has a firm grasp on the problem.

"Throughout his campaign the president-elect has been talking about what we need to do. We need to put the middle class at the center of the policy approach in a way that it hasn't been these last years," Summers said on NBC's Today Show.

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