Posted on 05/13/20
| News Source: MATZAV
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday that 40 percent of U.S. households earning less than $40,000 a year lost their jobs in March, underscoring the devastating financial effect of the pandemic on low-income workers.
“This reversal of economic fortune has caused a level of pain that is hard to capture in words, as lives are upended amid great uncertainty about the future,” he said in prepared remarks at a virtual event hosted by the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington.
The new figures back up anecdotal evidence suggesting lower-income workers have been hardest hit by the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, which has resulted in tens of millions of Americans filing for unemployment benefits since mid-March. The unemployment rate spiked to 14.7 percent in April, the highest level since the Great Depression.
Read more at The Hill.