Jobless claims for last week have once again skyrocketed, this time to over 5 million, bringing the total jobless claims since the country went on lockdown to almost 22 million:
AP – The wave of layoffs that has engulfed the U.S. economy since the coronavirus struck forced 5.2 million more people to seek unemployment benefits last week, the government reported Thursday.
Roughly 22 million have now sought jobless benefits in the past month — easily the worst stretch of U.S. job losses on record. It means that roughly one in seven workers have lost their jobs in that time.
The grim figures point to an economy that is tumbling into what appears to be a calamitous recession, the worst in decades. The nation’s output could shrink by roughly 10.5% before it starts to rebound, according to Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. That would be more than double the contraction that occurred during the 2008-2009 recession, which was the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Layoffs are spreading beyond service industries like hotels, bars and restaurants, which absorbed the brunt of the initial job cuts, into white collar professional occupations, including software programmers, construction workers and sales people.
Trump is supposed to make his big announcement today regarding reopening the economy and it’s a good day to do it, as these jobless claims and a sense of urgency will be fresh in people’s minds.
There is a slight bit of good news with these jobless claims, however, and that is they appear to be slowing. Ignoring the 3.3 million for the first week, the second week of jobless claims was 6.9 million, the third week was 6.6 million and now we’re at 5.2 million.
I don’t know what the actual unemployment rate would be at this point, but some suggest it is upwards of 17% at this point and could reach up to 20% or more for the month of April.