Washington, March 7: With unemployment rate touching 8.1 percent, there seems to be no end to the gloomy prospects of the economy.

The US economy faces grim prospects as more and more job losses are being reported with the dawn of each new day. According to the Labor Department, the records show loss of 651,000 jobs in the month of February alone.

“The sharp and widespread contraction in the labor market continued in February,” stated Keith Hall, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As per the government report this Friday, the current jobless rate has already equaled the estimated unemployment rate for the whole year. The unemployment has increased by nearly 5 million over the past year taking the total number of unemployed Americans to 12.5 million. The rate of unemployment in January was 7.6 percent, which has been highest since December 1983.

“It's another very bad number in February,” stated chief economist of Global Insight, Nariman Behravesh.

“It still looks like the jobs market is in something of a free fall. None of these numbers provide any room for optimism or hope yet,” added Behravesh.

The president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, Larry Mishel, said, “This is what falling off a cliff looks like.”

“We've seen the sharpest decline in employment and the sharpest decline in private sector hours worked - a 5.5 percent decline - than in any recession in 50 years,” warned Mishel while looking at the trends during the past 14 months of economic crisis.

The greater-than-ever thinning payrolls coupled with multiplying laid off employees leave no room for respite, at least in the near future, feel the economists.

“Since the recession began, the rise in unemployment has been concentrated among people who lost jobs, as opposed to job leavers or people joining the labor force,” stated Keith Hall, Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner.

The economic downturn has engulfed almost every sector of the economy. To go by the figures, there were 33,000 layoffs in leisure and hospitality sector, more than 104,000 eliminations by construction companies, while professional and business services were forced to cut nearly 180,000 jobs in the month of February.

Additionally, there have been reports of 168,000 layoffs in factories, 44,000 jobs slashed in financial sector, and more than 78,000 employees working in temporary-help agencies having been laid off.

Steve Land, one of the recently laid off employees, stated, “Well I was working for Penmac and Strive and they just laid me off yesterday.”

The only sectors which have been spared by the worsening global meltdown include health services, education and government.

An economist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., Campbell Harvey, feels that “Unemployment takes a while to come around, so you can be past the trough of the recession and unemployment continues to increase. Part of the problem is what we've got now has got to get worse.

“Even if we had a recovery in summer of 2009, the numbers will continue to get worse throughout 2009.”

Most economists fear the economic situation to become worse, calling for immediate financial rescue plans by Obama administration.