Casey Berry
4/24/09
Job lost worst since 1974 as downturn deepens
By Alister Bull

The team that met last week in Washington said that the U.S. has gotten rid of 533,000 jobs from the payrolls just in the month of November. This one year old recession is the worst one in 34 years. The unemployment rate is up 6.7 percent, which is the highest it’s been since the early 90’s. At this time 10.3 million people are out of a job and are probably struggling to pay their bills. Richard Yamarone said “you can’t get much uglier than this. The economy has just collapsed and has gone into a free fall.” Due to a recent collapse in the U.S. housing market this economy situation has turned into a global “credit crisis”. A number of large companies are making job cuts, including, AT&T, General Motors Inc., and Legg Mason Inc. Our jobless rate stands at 6.5 percent but experts are saying that they predict it to reach 8 percent in the near future. Obama stepped in and put out a $700 billion tax plan but so far the jobs are still being lost. People are going for interviews but the employers are telling them that there’s just simply not enough money in the budget to hire anyone new at this time
This whole jobless situation in terrifying and if people can’t afford to hire anyone then no one is going to get a job anytime soon. Some people are trying to file for unemployment and some are losing their homes due to foreclosures. But if everyone tries to file for unemployment then eventually we will run out of money there too. It’s so scary and I never expected to see this kind of thing happen to our economy in my lifetime. Obama said that things would have to continue to worsen before they could get better, but I don’t honestly see how things could get any worse than they already are.