Another 100,000 jobs lost in the U.S.

Nearly two years after the Great Recession began, the U.S. economy still is shedding jobs, economists said ahead of the Labor Department's November jobs report.

Another 100,000 jobs were destroyed during November, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed. It would be the 23rd consecutive month of job losses, the longest losing streak since the 1930s. The official unemployment rate is expected to remain at 10.2%, the highest since 1983.

After the steep drop in gross domestic product in late 2008 and early 2009, the economy is growing again, but it's not growing fast enough to create any jobs. So far, at least 7.4 million jobs have been lost, an estimate that's likely to be revised to more than 8 million.
However, most economists we surveyed think the economy will continue to grow at about a 3% annual pace through the middle of next year. That should be just fast enough to encourage some businesses to increase the work week for their remaining workers and to start hiring again.

Because so many jobs were lost at the end of 2008 (and, to a lesser extent, at the end of 2007), the seasonal adjustment process could be assuming that all those losses were due to normal seasonal variations, and not to the extremely distressed economy. That means that November's payroll figures will likely overstate what's really going on