No Run-of-the-Mill Recession

Today, the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls (jobs) decreased by 467,000 in June. The stock market declined sharply on the news. This chart puts that decline into perspective by comparing job losses during the current economic recession (solid red line) to that of the last recession (dashed gold line) and the average recession from 1954-2006 (dashed blue line). As the chart illustrates, the current job market has suffered losses that are nearly three times as much as the average. In fact, if this were an average recession/job loss cycle, the number of jobs would have begun to increase three months ago.