Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Walmart.

Today's Friday, January 8th.

The number of daily COVID deaths is up past 4,000, GOP's support for Trump is down, and we're

focused on America's lethargic labor market. The December jobs report came out this morning, and to call it underwhelming would be a

compliment. Overall, the country lost 140,000 jobs versus economist expectations of a 50,000

job gain, making it the first monthly loss since April. In terms of the unemployment rate,

it held steady at 6.7 percent, and for context, that's well below the April high of 14.7

percent, but well above the January figure, the pre-pandemic figure, of 3.6 percent. Meanwhile,

stocks continue to rise because, well, Wall Street no longer intersects with Main Street.

The bottom line here is that the pandemic is inversely correlated to the jobs market.

When one gets stronger, the other gets weaker.

So we want to dig into the numbers, what they really mean, and where we go from here,

with Axios business reporters

Felix Salmon and Courtney Brown.

But first, this.

We're joined now by Axios' Courtney Brown and Felix Salmon.

Courtney, let me start with you outside of the headline numbers, the big jobs down number, what inside this report kind of

struck you the most or maybe surprised you the most? Just how much this report reflects the

third wave of the coronavirus. The sector that was the most impacted or got hit hardest was

the leisure and hospitality sector,

which lost over 500,000 jobs. Three-quarters of those were from places like restaurants and bars.

So we're seeing kind of this regression back to what we saw at the onset of the pandemic,

...