Friday's employment report from the Department of Labor wasn't quite as ugly as expected, though it could be described as nothing less than disastrous all the same. The "loss" of 20.5 million jobs translated into an unemployment rate of 14.7%. Both were records. Yet, the bulk of those job losses weren't a case where there wasn't a job waiting for someone. It was a case of workers essentially not being allowed to go to work. If the situation lingers long enough, we could start to see more of the former and less of the latter. As it stands right now, however, don't jump to conclusions. The looming end of lockdown may push these people back into work pretty quickly.

In a similar vein, there are now 23.08 million people officially out of work, as measured by their filing for unemployment benefits. Two months ago, that figure was 5.8 million. Conversely, two months ago there were 152.4 million people regularly going to work. Now there are only 131.1 million people saying they've still got jobs (though it's possible some of them aren't actually "going" to work).

As one would expect, the impact of the coronavirus-related layoffs has shaken up the nation's labor force participation rates and the employment/population ration quite a bit. Only 51.2% of the country's participants are employed at this time, down from February's 61.2%. And, only 60.2% of the population reports they're actually in the work force, working or not. That number was 63.4% just a couple of months ago. Both current figures are record-breaking lows.

There is one bright spot... sort of. While lots of people are out of work, the people who are still working are getting paid very well, and they're getting lots of hours. The average hourly pay for all employees now stands at $30.00 per hour, and the average hourly pay even for non-supervisory workers is a healthy $25.12. Two months ago, those numbers would have been $28.50 and $23.96. The average workweek now stands at 34.2 hours, up slightly from March's 34.1, though down from the typical 34.4 hours seen between 2012 and 2019. All told, there's still a good amount of income being earned, even if it's not being earned uniformly.

Don't lend too much credence to any of the data. Not only is it all changing very rapidly, it's not the usual reflection of economic strength -- or weakness -- we'd expect it to reflect. These are wild, black swan circumstances that the entire world is working to quickly reverse.

Still, the numbers reported for May will be compared to April's results. It's difficult to imagine things getting worse. But, if we don't see any real evidence that things are getting better, that could prove problematic for the market.