With the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation\u2019s employers shed 533,000 jobs in November, the 11th consecutive monthly decline, the government reported Friday morning, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.<\/p>\n
The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history,\u201d\u009d said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters\/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s. \u201cIt is being driven down by a host of factors: falling home and stock prices, fewer work hours, smaller bonuses, less overtime and disappearing jobs.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n