Didn't we have negative unemployment rate sometime during or right after COVID? I remember people talking about how gamed and disconnected from reality these numbers were because (I think) a bunch of people stopped looking for work or filing for unemployment and were dropped from the labor force for official statistics. It really messed up the models being used.
As far as I understand, that’s (negative unemployment) not possible with the way the statistic is measured. I might be confused though as I’ve never heard of the term.
In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.