While Utah has shed 11,500 jobs over the last year, at a rate slower than the national average, the pace of job declines has accelerated most recently and will likely continue to do so, according to the most recent employment report by the state’s department of workforce services.

The acceleration is hefty, Mark Knold, a senior economist with the state, says, adding that the prolonged decline in construction and manufacturing now has spread to the services sector in the state’s job market. “The last time we saw employment numbers fall like this in Utah was in late 2001, when we were entering that period’s dot com recession,” he notes in the most recent report. Utah’s rate of job loss is now pegged at 0.9 percent and its unemployment rate is 3.7%, both below the national averages of 1.5 percent and 6.7 percent, respectively.

Six of the state’s 11 main employment sectors — construction, manufacturing, information, financial activities, professional and business, and miscellaneous — have lost jobs over the last year. Meanwhile, the remaining five — natural resources; trade, transportation and utilities; education and health; leisure and hospitality, and government — continue to add jobs. Most notably, the natural resources sector has added jobs at an 8 percent clip. On the other hand, construction jobs have declined by 15.3 percent. Some of the sectors in the positive side of the territory may also migrate to the negative side of the ledger in coming months, Knold explains.

Knold sees little to be optimistic in 2009. Also, it is difficult to make any predictions of any lasting value because of the forthcoming change of administrations in the nation’s capital along with the anticipated benefits of proposed stimulus packages. For Utah, “the current situation has the potential to be both deeper and longer than either” in 1954 or 2002, he adds. Even accounting for the usual seasonal fluctuations in employment, the state has seen a significant jump in claims being filed for unemployment benefits. In the first week of November 2007, the number was 1,400. In the first week of December, it was 3,600.

The New York markets today responded positively and aggressively to the news that the Federal Reserve has cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low and said it will employ “all available tools” to revive the economy. “A big, widespread, explosive, incendiary shell has come out of the Fed’s cannon,” says Frederic Dickson, who helps oversee about $19 billion as chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon. “It’s a bloody big deal. This is the kick-it-up-a-notch moment.”