Even if public health concerns can be resolved relatively soon, a hole in aggregate demand could persist for some time.
The jobs numbers were the catastrophe everybody was expecting.
April 2020 — more technically, the period between the second week of March and the second week of April — was the worst month for American workers at least since the Great Depression and possibly in the history of the nation.
That isn’t really a surprise, but one aspect of the latest employment report does help crystallize the nature of what the United States is grappling with. In a set of tables in the final pages of the jobs numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the number of jobs gained or lost in each industry, broken down in a fairly fine-grained way.
Across dozens and dozens of industries, only one added a meaningful number of jobs in April: general merchandise stores, including warehouse clubs and supercenters. They increased their payrolls by 93,400 positions.
That makes sense given Americans need to buy groceries and other at-home staples, and Walmart has said publicly that it is hiring on a large scale to meet demand.
There were a few other sectors with very narrowly positive numbers, including the manufacture of computers and peripherals (employment up 800), monetary authorities (up 100, not very many considering the trillions of dollars in assets the Federal Reserve is buying to stimulate the economy), and the U. S. Postal Service (up 500).
But Walmart and a few odd exceptions aside, there was no shelter in the storm for American workers in the last month. Anyone still thinking that the pandemic’s economic effects are limited to people in restaurants, travel and similar service businesses is very much mistaken.
