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American Morning

America Recovers: Unemployment Rate Holds Steady

Aired October 05, 2001 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: We have a true Pavlovian response here. You here that bell, and Andy Serwer ends up on the set to talk about how the markets are going to do.

Welcome back, our man from "Fortune" magazine.

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: I'm Supposed to start barking now, right?

ZAHN: You are. You have keen timing.

SERWER: Right, right.

ZAHN: You've got to bark up some information is what you have to do.

SERWER: Yes, we had this job reports at 8:30 that people had been anticipating, good news, bad news. The good news is the unemployment rate held at 4.9 percent, the same as August. If we go back and look, I think we have a screen of the unemployment rate going back to beginning of year. You can see it creeping up there. We have this screen coming at some point, I guess. But it's been creeping from 4.2 percent in January up to 4.9 percent now. Of course people had been anticipating 5 percent.

ZAHN: I'm kind of surprised. Aren't you kind of surprised?

SERWER: I'm a little bit surprised, but you know, it's very confusing the way they calculate the data. The bad news, twofold. Payrolls fell 199,000 in September, the largest drop since February of 1991.

ZAHN: You asked for those numbers, and we give them to you. And there they are.

SERWER: There they are. Good. You can see that's rate just been creeping up since the beginning of year. Payrolls have fell 199,000 jobs. We're only looking for cuts of 100,000 jobs, the largest since February of '91. Most importantly, the data really were taken from before the attacks. So this doesn't take into accounts all those hundreds of thousands of jobs, Paula, that were lost in the airline business.

I've talk to an economist who anticipates their have now been 600,000 jobs lost in airlines, hotels gaming and tourism.

ZAHN: Six hundred thousand.

SERWER: That's right. Those have not calculated in. And Treasury Secretary O'Neill said to you yesterday that the October numbers were going to be the bad ones. So I think that the bad news really hasn't hit yet in the unemployment figures. We're going to have to wait another month. As far as the open today, the futures were doing OK. When this report came, they started to slip. Overseas markets were mixed. We were flat in Asia. Europe as down to mixed. And then we have some stocks that we are going to following today, especially technology stocks.

ZAHN: Like which ones?

SERWER: Some bad news from Advanced Micro Devices, the important chipmaker, Gateway, the bit PC maker. Both of them said their businesses were weaker. And this just came across the tapes, Sun Microsystems, the big maker of servers, just announced they're going to be laying off 9 percent of their workforce. Good news, though, from Starbucks. They said that their business is holding steady. I guess we're all drinking a lot of coffee, right guys?

ZAHN: Good news, bad news. Nine thousand layoffs, that's terrible.

All right, thank you.

SERWER: That was nine percent, nine percent of the workforce from Sun.

ZAHN: Nine percent. OK, thank you for straightening me out. That's what we count on to do here everyday. If you have some financial questions for Andy, we'd like for you to e-mail at attack@cnn.com. Andy will help an answer those e-mails.

You're ready, right, Andy?

SERWER: I'm ready to go.

ZAHN: All right, thanks. See you a little bit later on this morning.

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