August Posts Mammoth Job Growth

August was another mammoth month for job growth.

The U.S. economy added 1.4 million jobs in August.

That drops the unemployment rate sharply to 8.4%. That’s a huge decline from the peak of 14.7% in April, and the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began that the unemployment rate has dropped below 10%.

Overall, 10.8 million jobs have been created in four months, from May to August.

However, that’s just half of the 22 million jobs lost during the pandemic–suggesting there’s still a lot more to do during this recovery.

What’s more, the jobs aren’t returning equally to the entire country: New York and Los Angeles, the two largest cities in the country, are still largely locked down–and still have sky-high unemployment rates above 16%.

However, in places where the pandemic has largely ebbed, jobs are coming back quickly.

“We are still moving in the right direction and the pace of the jobs recovery seems to have picked up, but it still looks like it will take a while – and likely a vaccine – before we get back close to where we were at the beginning of this year,” said Tony Bedikian, head of global markets at Citizens Bank. “We continue to be optimistic that the economy has turned a corner and that we’ll continue to see steady progress.”