By the Associated Press:
A grim picture of the U.S. job market’s sudden collapse emerged Friday with a report that employers shed hundreds of thousands of jobs last month because of the viral outbreak that’s brought the economy to a near-standstill.
The loss of 701,000 jobs, reported by the Labor Department, ended nearly a decade of uninterrupted job growth, the longest such streak on record.
The unemployment rate surged in March from a 50-year low of 3.5% to 4.4%. And that’s just a hint of what’s to come. For the April jobs report that will be released in early May, economists expect as many as a record 20 million losses and an unemployment rate of around 15%
