U.S. economy lost 701K jobs in March, ending record-long hiring streak
Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous, Brian Sozzi and Jess Smith take a deep dive into the March jobs report and break it down by sector.
Video Transcript
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Yahoo Finance Live. I'm Alexis Christoforous.
Investors are digesting a very ugly March unemployment report today. It looks like employers cut 701,000 jobs. The unemployment rate rose from 3 and 1/2% to 4.4%. It is the quickest one-month jump in the unemployment rate since 1975, and it doesn't even begin to reflect the picture that this pandemic is causing on the overall job market in the past two weeks.
We know 10 million Americans applied for first-time unemployment benefits. Those numbers are not reflected in this monthly jobs report. For a breakdown of what's in that report, let's head over to Jessica Smith. Good morning, Jess.
JESSICA SMITH: Good morning. It's worth hitting that big number one more time. The US economy lost 701,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate went up to 4.4%. Economists were expecting job losses of 100,000, so far surpassing these expectations here.
The biggest job losses were in leisure and hospitality. Obviously, that industry hard hit by the coronavirus. And most of those job losses were at bars and restaurants. Those specifically, bars and restaurants, lost 417,000 jobs, and that nearly offsets all of the gains that bars and restaurants have seen over the past two years.
Now, health care and social assistance lost 61,000 jobs. Professional and business services lost 52,000. Retail lost 46,000, and manufacturing lost 18,000 jobs. Now, we did see an increase in government hiring. That is largely because of hiring for the Census. The government hired-- hiring increased by 18,000, and 17,000 of those were workers hired for the Census.
We also did have some revisions. The February jobs number was revised downward from 273,000 to 214,000. The January number was also revised downward-- excuse me, the January number was revised down by 59,000 from 273 to 214, and February was revised up. So February revised up by 2,000 from 273 to 275. So with those revisions, there were 57,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.
Again, that big number-- 701,000 jobs lost in March. Unemployment rate at 4.4%. And then the U6, the broadest measure of unemployment, came in at 8.7%, up from 7% the month prior. Alexis?
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, Jess, thanks very much.
