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After 113 consecutive months of job gains, the U.S. economy posted negative nonfarm payrolls in March.
Payrolls fell by 701,000 last month, the biggest monthly decline since March 2009. The unemployment rate also jumped to 4.4% from 3.5% in February, the biggest month-on-month increase since January 1975. That’s the bad news.
The worse news: The Labor Department mainly collected the data in the first half of the month. Early March might feel like a lifetime ago, but if you can remember, it was before state governments began enforcing shutdowns to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Those shutdowns forced millions of layoffs…meaning April’s report is going to be way, way worse.
How bad? St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said unemployment could hit 30% this quarter. Oxford Economics thinks the jobless rate will hit 16% and the economy will lose 27.9 million jobs by May. That would more than double the jobs lost in the last recession.
The Commercial Real Estate Alpha Site 
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