Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday said "the reversal of economic fortune" brought on by the coronavirus pandemic over the last two months in the United States "has caused a level of pain that is hard to capture in words."
Statistics, though, can help paint a clearer picture of the crisis. In the same address, Powell said the Fed is releasing a survey Thursday which found that among people who were working in February, nearly 40 percent of those in households making less than $40,000 per year lost a job in March.
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