Companies Cut Payrolls at Faster Pace - by Bob Willis and Courtney Schlisserman
Reports issued two days before the release of U.S. jobless data showed private employers cut payrolls at a faster pace in December, threatening to send the unemployment rate to levels unseen in a quarter century.“The level of unemployment is going to be higher” and may exceed 10 percent, Martin Feldstein, the former National Bureau of Economic Research president and Harvard University professor said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “It’s really bad and it needs a fix,” he said before a hearing on the fiscal-stimulus plan with House lawmakers in Washington. Companies cut an estimated 693,000 jobs in December, the most since ADP Employer Services began its gauge based on payroll data in 2001. Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said firings announced by U.S. employers rose 275 percent last month from December 2007, to 166,348.
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