As Unemployment Hits 6.5%, Those Expecting 7% Now Bracing for 8%

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 5:02PM EDT · Published Nov 7, 8:34AM EST

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Unemply If you were looking for great news on the jobs report this morning, you probably believed the guy telling that "NOT JOKE" in the Borat movie. Unemployment came in at a monstrous 6.5% rather than the 6.1% given for September. This was the worst unemployment rate since 1994.

The non-farm payrolls came in at a whopping drop at -240,000. Estimates were for a drop of -200,000 or so, but the numbers being passed around yesterday on instant messengers from Wall Street professionals were more like -250,000. Some were even bracing for a drop of -275,000 and worse. September was revised sharply lower to show a job loss of 284,000.

We have now lost 1.2 million jobs this year, and the NBER has not yet managed to get around to declaring an official recession. Here are the by-sector numbers we saw:

manufacturing -90,000
construction -49,000
business and professional -45,000
financial-sector -24,000
retail -38,000
leisure and hospitality -16,000 jobs.
temporary employment -50,000

These numbers would have again been much worse if you took out the government and health care workers from the equation. Uncle Sam and local governments added 23,000 jobs and health care workers grew by another 26,000 jobs.

With all of the layoff announcements, you know what this means. The beatings will continue.

Jon C. Ogg
November 7, 2008

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.