Total non-farm payroll employment fell by 20.5 million in April, and the unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The changes in these measures reflect the effects of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the Trump Administration’s lack of efforts to contain it – since it was going to go away in April. Wrong. It shut the country down. And the grim news is based on data from only the first two weeks of April. The worst is yet to come.
The worst is yet to come because of lack of testing and the absence of a National COVID elimination strategy from the anti-science Trump Administration.
Employment fell sharply in all major industry sectors. There were particularly heavy job losses in leisure and hospitality where the spread was initially ignored as Washington slept – until people, now former customers stopped traveling or died. This was out of self-preservation as the corpses mounted in non-living color on the news and in statistical counts no matter what Trump and Pence said. It was also the result of some Democratically-controlled states where shelter in place was imposed out of concern for the health of residents and not for the health of the increasingly infected Trump reelection campaign.
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Penske Automotive Q1 2020 Results -46% at $0.64 per share
In the U.S., through February same-store new and used automotive retail unit sales increased 7.5% and declined 1.1% internationally. In March, the outbreak of COVID-19 began to impact Penske in all markets. Many U.S. and Germany dealerships were impacted by shelter-in-place orders while operations in Italy, Spain and the U.K. were closed. As a result, same-store new and used automotive retail unit sales for the month of March declined -40.2%. Continue reading →