Another 2M Job Could Lose in 2009, Report Says
Monday, January 12, 2009. The U.S. economy could lose another two million jobs in 2009, on top of the 2.6 million lost in 2008, according to a Conference Board report.
The Conference Board said its Employment Trends Index fell to 99.6 in December, decreasing 1.6% from November’s revised 101.2. That’s a 16% drop from the level in December the prior year.
The ETI is now at a 17-month decline.
The ETI is calculated using eight labor-market measures, including initial-claims filings as reported by the Department of Labor, percentage of respondents to another Conference Board report who say they find jobs “hard to get,” and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data on how many people are working part-time for economic reasons.
All eight of the measures have declined over the 17 months, the Conference Board said, noting that the measures of people working part-time for economic reasons and the number of temporary-help hires had particularly gone downward.
“The sharp declines in the Employment Trends Index suggest that in 2009,” the number of jobs lost in the U.S. economy “could grow by another two million,” Conference Board’s Senior Economist Gad Levanon was quoted as saying in the organization’s press release. He said the continued deterioration in the ETI “signals that no turnaround in the labor market is to be expected in the near future.”
President Obama has made job-creation and job-saving a central part of the policy push he intends to make once he takes office.
On Sunday, Obama’s transition team published a report from two of his top economists that said his plot, which involves hundreds of billions in capital spending as well as tax cuts, tax credits and more, would save or make three million to four million jobs. But, economic results are notoriously hard to predict, and it’s hard to estimate exactly what kind of impact the plot would really have.
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Tags: bureau of labor statistic, conference board, department of labor, employment trends index, eti, Financial News, Financial News, job lose, President Obama, us economyTags: bureau of labor statistic, conference board, department of labor, employment trends index, eti, Financial News, job lose, President Obama, us economy
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