On average, the United States has seen the loss of nearly 14,000
jobs each day since September 1. In 90 days from that date,
close to 1.3 million Americans lost their jobs. After weeks of
headline-grabbing events on Wall Street, these developments tend
to recede into the background. Current estimates suggest over
half a million Americans lost their jobs in November alone. This
is something not seen in a single month since December 1974.
Things are not as bad as they appear for the US economy. They're
worse. As the data flows in, even estimates for earlier months
have been revised sharply upwards. The September job loss figure
was recorded as 159,000 two months ago. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics now says the figure is 403,000. The first figure for
October was 240,000 jobs lost Now it is 320,000. The
unemployment rate for teenagers, at 20.4 per cent, is three
times the claimed national rate of 6.7 per cent. (This does not
include those who have given up looking for work in despair. Nor
does it count those work