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Investing.com — U.S. stock markets opened Friday lower after government data suggested that the U.S. economy shed jobs faster than widely expected as the Covid-19 started to hit.
By 9:33 AM ET (1333 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 123 points, or 0.6%, while the S&P 500 was down 0.2% and the NASDAQ Composite was down 0.3%. As such, all three were on course for what would be – in the context of recent volatility – modest losses for the week of less than 2%.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics had said earlier that non-farm employment in the U.S. fell by 701,000 in the month to mid-March, far more than the 100,000 drop expected.
Even those data have been largely rendered meaningless by the record spike in jobless claims in the two weeks since the cut-off date for the BLS’s report. In those two weeks, some 10 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits.
