Jobs

Even before the coronavirus lockdown, US President Donald Trump could boast a good jobs record before the election later on this year.

It looks like he can do it again:

U.S. unemployment dropped unexpectedly in May to 13.3 per cent as reopened businesses began recalling millions of workers faster than economists had predicted.

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Furman’s case begins with the premise that the 2020 pandemic-triggered economic collapse is categorically different than the Great Depression or the Great Recession, which both had slow, grinding recoveries.

Instead, he believes, the way to think about the current economic drop-off, at least in the first two phases, is more like what happens to a thriving economy during and after a natural disaster: a quick and steep decline in economic activity followed by a quick and steep rebound.

That sounds a lot better than the state Canada is in. Unemployment, already bad before the lockdown, is at 13.7 percent and our economic outlook is even worse.


Also:

The federal government continues to dither over whether to allow Huawei Technologies to supply equipment for Canada’s 5G wireless network, despite an ongoing trade war with Beijing and a growing consensus among our allies that China constitutes a threat to world order. But this week, Canada’s major telecommunications companies made it clear that Ottawa’s seeming inability to make a decision is not going to slow down their plans to roll out their next-generation networks.

On Tuesday morning, on the heels of a B.C. court striking down Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou’s attempt to have her extradition case thrown out, Bell Canada announced that Ericsson, which is based in Sweden, will provide equipment for its 5G network. The announcement came four months after the company revealed its first 5G network equipment contract with Finnish tech giant Nokia. A few hours later, Telus also disclosed that it had chosen Nokia and Ericsson to provide it with 5G networking equipment.

What was notable in the announcements was not that the telcos had chosen the two Scandinavian suppliers, but that Huawei was conspicuously absent from the list. The Telus announcement was particularly surprising because it has an existing relationship with the Chinese telecom giant, which supplied much of the equipment for its 4G network, and has previously stated that Huawei should be included.