Mon dieu! Employers cut more than half a million jobs in November.....

[marmar]

Employers in U.S. Cut 533,000 Jobs; Jobless Rate Rises to 6.7%
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By Bob Willis

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. employers eliminated jobs in November at the fastest pace in 34 years and the unemployment rate jumped as the year-long recession engulfing the world's largest economy deepened.

Payrolls shrank by 533,000 workers last month, the biggest loss since December 1974, after decreasing a revised 320,000 the prior month, the Labor Department said today in Washington. November's job losses exceeded all estimates in a Bloomberg News survey of 73 economists. The jobless rate rose to 6.7 percent, the highest level since 1993.

Job losses are likely to keep cascading into next year as the collapse in credit and slump in spending hurt companies from General Motors Corp. to Citigroup Inc. and AT&T Inc. President- elect Barack Obama, confronting what he called a ``crisis of historic proportions,'' announced a plan last week to save or create 2.5 million jobs in two years.

``The labor market capsized in November. Layoffs are accelerating as businesses are aggressively cutting costs,'' Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said before the report. ``The financial panic has hammered the economy and we are seeing a very broad-based decline in payrolls.''

Payrolls were forecast to drop by 335,000 after declining by a previously reported 240,000 in October, according to the median estimate in the Bloomberg survey. Estimates of the month's job losses ranged from 220,000 to 470,000. The jobless rate was projected to rise to 6.8 percent. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=atyGePggg0uo&refer=home