China is doubling down on fighting the coronavirus pandemic and creating jobs as the number of people thrown out of work soars worldwide.
A woman walks past a store advertising sales at 70 percent off, Thursday, May 21, 2020, in Cleveland. More than 2.4 million people applied for U.S. unemployment benefits last week in the latest wave of layoffs from the viral outbreak that triggered widespread business shutdowns two months ago and sent the economy into a deep recession.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, the top economic leader, said Friday that Beijing would give local governments 2 trillion yuan to help them undo the damage from shutdowns imposed to curb the spread of the virus after it first appeared in central China in late 2019.Li told the annual session of the largely ceremonial National People’s Congress that the battle against the new coronavirus, which has infected at least 5.
Japan’s economy was already sliding into recession in late 2019, before the pandemic struck, devastating economies nearly everywhere as consumers were ordered to stay home and businesses to stay closed in many hard-hit areas. The impact on Japan’s jobless rate remains unclear, since the country did not impose hard lockdowns and many people are still commuting to work.
“It seems employers have stopped hiring,” said Zhang Jijun, a migrant laborer who came to Beijing from the western province of Shanxi. “All the available jobs are not good and nobody wants to go.”In the U.S., even as states from coast to coast gradually began reopening their economies and letting people go back to work, more than 2.4 million people filed for unemployment last week, the Labor Department said.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said over the weekend that U.S. unemployment could peak in May or June at 20% to 25%, a level last seen during the depths of the Great Depression almost 90 years ago. Unemployment in April stood at 14.7%, a figure also unmatched since the 1930s.
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