Job market continues to crumble
TEXT OF STORY
Bob Moon: And on the other hand, as we mentioned, you can trace that crumbling job market back even further than last month.
The Labor Department also revised its reading for the month of May, adding an extra 13,000 lost jobs to that tally, which means we’ve lost 124,000 jobs over the past eight weeks.
Nariman Behrevesh is chief economist at Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Nariman Behrevesh: I think we are not done with the bad news. In fact, we think the jobs picture will continue to worsen for awhile. For example, we think the unemployment rate will certainly head to 6 percent, maybe even a little higher, in the next six months, so we’re not done yet.
And Behrevesh worries that this puts an even tighter squeeze on our spending.
Behrevesh: Consumers are facing at least four bits of bad news. One is certainly shrinking jobs. The other, of course, is gasoline prices, very high gasoline prices. And then you’ve got the stock market that’s struggling and then on top of that house prices are dropping in most markets. So this is not a good time for consumers and they are predictably in a very bad mood.
Did he mention oil prices? Up to almost $146 dollars a barrel today, more than 50 percent since the year began.
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