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US stock futures higher after bleak jobs report

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America lost 20.5 million jobs in April as the coronavirus crisis devastated the country’s labor market, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. It was the largest single month of job losses since the BLS began tracking the data in 1939.

The unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, the highest on record since the BLS began its monthly series in 1948.

Read more about today’s jobs report here.

American drivers, some of whom are hurting financially from mass unemployment, may not be happy to see that prices at the pump are no longer imploding.

The national average for a gallon of gas is now at $1.81, according to AAA. While that’s well below $2.89 a gallon from a year ago, it’s also off the low of $1.77.

During the height of the crisis, more than a dozen US states had at least one gas station with sub-$1-a-gallon gasoline, according to GasBuddy. Now just two stations in the nation are sitting below $1 a gallon, both in Arkansas.

“Ultra-low prices have disappeared,” said Patrick DeHaan, oil and refined products analyst at GasBuddy.

These trends, along with record supply cuts by OPEC and Russia, have allowed some cautious optimism to creep back into an oil market that was filled with gloom and doom for much of this year.

We think the bottom of pricing is in. We don’t think we’ll see a return of negative prices over the short term,” said Michael Tran, RBC’s director of global energy strategy.

Uber (UBER) shares climbed 8% higher in premarket trading despite reporting a $2.9 billion loss in the first three months of this year.

In the company’s earnings report late Thursday, Uber also said it posted revenue of $3.5 billion in the first three months of the year, a 14% increase from a year earlier.

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the Rides business was down about 80% in the month of April, although it has been picking up in recent weeks.

The impact of pandemic on its Eats business, Khosrowshahi said, has been a silver lining. “The big opportunity that we thought Eats was just got bigger,” Khosrowshahi said on an earnings call.

Read more here.

US stock futures are moving higher ahead of this morning’s jobs report, which is expected to be the worst monthly report on record.

  • Dow futures are up 248 points, or 1.04%
  • S&P 500 futures increased 1.05%
  • Nasdaq Composite futures moved 1.01% higher

Stocks ended higher on Thursday, buoyed by investor optimism over the reopening of the US economy. The Nasdaq managed to turn green on the year and is up 0.1% for the year.

Millions of Americans who are out of work won’t need statistics to confirm what they already know: Their livelihoods have been hard hit by mass business closures during the coronavirus pandemic.

But the government’s official jobs report, set to be released this morning, will give one of the most comprehensive overviews of that economic fallout.

By all accounts, it’s expected to be a chilling report, showing layoffs surged and unemployment rose to Great Depression levels in April.

The report, which will be released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at 8:30 am ET, will inform policymakers as they continue to respond to the crisis, and it will document how severely stay-at-home orders have hurt American workers.

Economists polled by Refinitiv expect the US economy shed 21.85 million jobs in April, by far the largest number on record. The US government’s monthly jobs data dates back to 1939.

Read more about Friday’s historic jobs report here.

No end is in sight for coronavirus-related job losses.

The pandemic has ravaged the US labor market, and 1 in 5 American workers have filed for first-time unemployment benefits since mid-March, when lockdown measures took effect across the country.

Another 3.2 million Americans filed initial jobless claims last week, after factoring in seasonal adjustments, the Department of Labor reported Thursday.

Without those adjustments — which economists use to account for seasonal hiring fluctuations — the raw number was 2.8 million.

Read more about last weeks jobless claims here.

During the last two weeks of every month, about 350 contractors sit in cubicles in government call centers in Atlanta, Dallas, Kansas City and Fort Walton Beach, Florida, phoning companies with a list of questions about their latest payroll numbers. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s an important one.

The data they collect, which they feed into a computer software program, is part of what later becomes the official jobs report released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics every month. One of the most important economic indicators, especially in a crisis, it’s guarded securely and when released, its findings can move the stock market.

Its data informs the White House, Congress and the Federal Reserve as they make policy. And it will be written into the history books for years to come.

But in March and April, the data collectors couldn’t go into work. Read more here.

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