The Inland Echo

By News Services

The economy shed 345,000 jobs in May, a reduction in the pace of job losses, the government reported on Friday in its monthly employment report.

The unemployment rate climbed to 9.4 percent, its highest point in a quarter-century, and economists said the job losses were likely to pile up through the rest of the year. The slowing pace of losses fanned hopes for the plummeting job market, however the economy is still continuing to decline with no end in sight.

Pundits have suggested the United States will become a third world nation if Obama’s Democrat-controlled Congress doesn’t infuse more capital into individuals and small businesses. So far, Obama has followed the policy first embraced by the Bush administration, conducting bailouts of industry giants who continue to file for bankruptcy, despite government intervention.

Others have said that prices at the pump are also another leading cause of failure at the street level in the economy, and that a marked decrease in prices to 1979 levels when prices were below $1 a gallon, a price that corresponds to the start of the unemployment recovery in that era, are the best hope for a bottom-up recovery of the economy today. Artificial speculation continues to push retail prices up despite no changes in the physical oil commodities.

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