Vocabulary In the News: Unemployment expected to hit 10 percent

http://www.france24.com/en/20090617-usa-unemployment-rate-barack-obama-jobcuts-financial-crisis

Wednesday 17 June 2009

US unemployment is expected to hit 10 percent in 2009 despite a fall in job cuts, US President Barack Obama said in a television interview on Tuesday. The US jobless rate soared to 9.6 percent in May for the first time in 26 years.

AFP - US President Barack Obama said Tuesday that unemployment was expected to hit 10 percent this year as companies cut payrolls to cope with prolonged recession.

Asked during an interview with the Bloomberg television network whether the jobless rate, which surged to a 26-year high of 9.4 percent in May, would reach 10 percent, the president said:"Yes."

Queried whether the double-digit rate would occur this year, Obama also replied in the affirmative but added that jobs would continue to be lost even as the recession that struck in December 2007 eased.

"Yes. I think that what you've seen is that the pace of job loss has slowed, and I think that the economy is going to turn around.

"But as you know, jobs are a lagging indicator. And we've got to produce 150,000 jobs every month just to keep pace, just to flatten this out."

The latest Labor Department's monthly report, seen as one of the best indicators of economic momentum, offered conflicting signals about a weak labor market, but suggested that the pace of massive job cuts appeared to be easing.

Some 345,000 nonfarm jobs were shed in May -- much lower than the 520,000 expected and about half the monthly decline of the past six months.

But the unemployment rate, based on a separate survey of households, rose sharply from 8.9 percent to a worse-than-expected 9.4 percent, the highest level since August 1983.

Some said the labor report, along with revised jobless figures for March and April, showed the recession-ravaged economy may have hit bottom, consistent with the notion of "green shoots" of recovery cited by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

As a reminder, I’m doing the vocabulary differently now. Words are now linked to various online dictionaries so that you have to explore the various definitions of each word to find its meaning in the context of the text. You can also use this as a tool to explore the other uses and forms of each vocabulary word. This means that you have to work a bit more since I’m not going to do all the work for you! ;-)