In other economic news, the banking giant Citigroup has announced plans to eliminate 52,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its global work force. The New York Times describes this as one of the largest single rounds of layoffs on record.

John Challenger, Challenger, Gray & Christmas: “This is a big mega layoff, largest of the year, and we haven’t seen many layoffs of this size over the last decade. It certainly signals the depth of the problems in financial services and in the US economy when a company of this size can do such large job cuts.”