Split speed of economic recovery
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Job recovery is arriving much faster for workers in America’s highest earning industries.
Why it matters: The bottom earning industries are nowhere near recovered — right as the economy faces another test from the pandemic.
- Meanwhile, high earning industries have an unemployment rate that’s approaching normal.
Flashback: The unemployment rate in the highest and lowest earning industries was within a tight range, 3% and 3.5%, respectively, according to investment research firm the Leuthold Group. (Bottom earning sectors have historically seen slightly higher rates of unemployment.)
- Then the gap exploded when COVID-19 forced the initial wave of widespread lockdowns in the spring.
- High earning sectors’ unemployment rate rose to 12%. But it was nearly twice as bad for the lowest earning industries, with unemployment peaking at 23%.
Details: Industries like retail, leisure and hospitality, agriculture and nondurable goods are the bottom earning industries.
- Top earning industries include finance, durable goods, and professional and business services.
Between the lines: The unemployment rate among the low earning sectors remains 6 percentage points above its pre-pandemic level.
- Recovery is in reach for the high earning industries, with unemployment just 2.5 percentage points higher than pre-crisis levels.
Where it stands: More than half of currently unemployed Americans worked in the bottom earning industries, even though they represent only 24% of the workforce.
What they're saying: With soaring COVID-19 cases leading to restrictions across most of the country, analysts expect the lowest income industries to once again take a bigger hit to employment.
- "Similar to the summer’s second wave, high-earner, mostly anti-social industries (three-quarters of employment and a higher proportion of total income and spending) will likely again prove largely impervious,” Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the Leuthold Group, wrote in a research note on Wednesday.
- This could explain why the U.S. might not see as big an economic drag as the coronavirus rages across the country.
- Top earning workers “quickly and decisively entered a new [economic] expansion — even though 55% of the unemployed still struggle with extremely challenging conditions,” says Paulsen.
