US markets close deeply in red on weak jobs numbers

04 Apr 2020 Evaluate

The US markets closed deeply in red on Friday after a report from the Labor Department showed employment in the US fell much more than expected in the month of March. The report said employment plunged by 701,000 jobs in March after jumping by an upwardly revised 275,000 jobs in February. Street had expected employment to slump by 100,000 jobs compared to the addition of 273,000 jobs originally reported for the previous month. With the much bigger than expected drop in employment, the unemployment rate surged up to 4.4% in March from 3.5% in February as employers just began to trim hiring and cut payrolls ahead of social-distancing practices that have shut down swaths of the U.S. economy to help slow the spread of COVID-19, the deadly infection that was first identified in December but that has already been contracted by more than 1 million people world-wide. The unemployment rate had been expected to climb to 3.8%.

In other economic data, two reports on the US service sector activity showed sharply different pictures of that segment of the economy in March. The IHS Markit US services purchasing managers index was at 39.8, the steepest decline in its decade long history, but the nonmanufacturing index from the Institute for Supply Management was 52.5 down from 57.3, showing growth but at slowest pace since August 2016. A reading of at least 50 shows improving conditions while anything below that threshold signals contraction.

Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 360.91 points or 1.69 percent to 21,052.53, Nasdaq declined 114.23 points or 1.53 percent to 7,373.08 and S&P 500 was down by 38.25 points or 1.51 percent to 2,488.65.

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