Buy American: Joe Biden unveils US-centered economic plan to counter Trump

Democratic Party candidate accuses President Trump of ignoring the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis.

Democrat Joe Biden turned his campaign against President Donald Trump toward the economy Thursday, introducing a New Deal-like economic agenda while drawing a sharp contrast with a billionaire incumbent he said has abandoned working-class Americans amid cascading crises.

The former vice president presented details of a comprehensive agenda that he touted as the most aggressive government investment in the U.S. economy since World War II.

He also accused Trump of ignoring the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis while encouraging division amid a national reckoning with systemic racism.

His failures come with a terrible human cost and a deep economic toll, Biden said during a 30-minute address at a metal works firm near his boyhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Time and again, working families are paying the price for this administration's incompetence.

Biden's shift to the economy meets Trump on turf the Republican president had seen as his strength before the pandemic severely curtailed consumer activity and drove unemployment to near-Great Depression levels.

Now, Biden and his aides believe the issue is an all-encompassing opening that gives Democrats avenues to attack Trump on multiple fronts while explaining their own governing vision for the country.

The former vice president began Thursday with proposals intended to reinvigorate the U.S. manufacturing and technology sectors.

US entered recession in February, ending record-long expansion: Economists

The economists said employment peaked in February and fell sharply afterward, marking the beginning of the downturn.

The US economy entered a recession in February, a group of economists declared Monday, ending the longest expansion on record.

The economists said employment peaked in February and fell sharply afterward, marking the beginning of the downturn.

The economists make up a committee within the National Bureau of Economic Research, a trade group that determines when recessions begin and end.

It defines a recession as a decline in economic activity that lasts more than a few months.

The committee noted, though, that in this case, the depth of the downturn since February had led it to determine that a recession had begun.

The unprecedented magnitude of the decline in employment and production, and its broad reach across the entire economy, warrants the designation of this episode as a recession, even if it turns out to be briefer than earlier contractions, the NBER panel said.

The unemployment rate is officially 13.3 per cent, down from 14.7 per cent in April. Both figures are higher than in any other downturn since World War II.

A broader measure of underemployment that includes some of the unemployed who have given up looking and those who have been reduced to part-time status is 21.2 per cent.