After last week’s unprecedented 3.3 million surge in initial jobless claims, this week’s is even more unprecedented-er, adding a stunning 6.648 million (just 100k away from our estimate of 6.5million) for a two-week sum of 10 million new Americans claiming unemployment benefits…
Source: Bloomberg
As @GreekFire noted, “We’ve lost 46 jobs for every confirmed case of COVID-19 in the US…“
The 6.648mm print is worse than the worst of 50 estimating analysts’ expectations. Breaking down by state (which is one week lagged and so represents the prior week’s 3.3mm print detail), California, Pennsylvania, and New York dominate…
Source: Bloomberg
“The U.S. labor market is in free-fall,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics in New York.
“The prospect of more stringent lockdown measures and the fact that many states have not yet been able to process the full amount of jobless claim applications suggest the worst is still to come.”
And another important note is that weekly jobless claims data are based on “hard facts”, UBS points out, unlike survey data
which is subject to quirks around:
a) some of the treatment of supply chains, which has flattered data,
b) the fact that many respondents will not be replying to surveys during the virus disruption period, and
c) survey data will give more accurate assessments during ‘normal’ times, perhaps not as much in unusual times.
Of course, the government is coming to the rescue. As a result of the freshly-passed ‘relief’ bill, self-employed and gig-workers who previously were unable to claim unemployment benefits are now eligible. In addition, the unemployed will get up to $600 per week for up to four months, which is equivalent to $15 per hour for a 40-hour workweek. By comparison, the government-mandated minimum wage is about $7.25 per hour and the average jobless benefits payment was roughly $385 per person per month at the start of this year.
“Why work when one is better off not working financially and health wise?” said a Sung Won Sohn, a business economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
With more than 80% of Americans under some form of lockdown, up from less than 50% a couple of weeks ago, this is far from over.
As RealInvestmentAdvice.com’s Lance Roberts warns, the importance is that unemployment rates in the U.S. are about to spike to levels not seen since the “Great Depression.” Based on the number of claims being filed, we can estimate that unemployment will jump to 15-20% over the next quarter as economic growth slides 8%, or more.
Is America Preparing For Civil War?
It surely isn’t helping when a white American Christian TV Host Warns Followers To Stockpile Ammo For Civil War With ‘Pagan Left’:
I believe the primary reasons for people buying guns is because mostly Democratic areas took the opportunity to express their anti 2nd amendment sentiment by using the epidemic as an excuse for what they couldn’t do otherwise to shutter the source of firearm supply. They have not learned over many years now that everytime they pull one of their anti 2nd Amendment stunts it gets exactly the opposite reaction they would like which is putting more guns rather than less guns in the hands of the public. Definition of crazy is to repeat the same act time after time despite getting the same result.
Observation of Leftist behavior particularly over the past three years is that these people have totally lost it and no longer operate with logic, common sense, rational behavior, etc. They are simply nuts.
The other reason people buy guns of course is for self protection when these same Governmental nuts release criminals back into the public, police don’t do their jobs, and so people have to look after themselves. If these Democrats had half a brain they would realize that 3 million police and military most of whom are NOT trained to go door to door to confiscate firearms would have to collect over 300 million firearms from over 140 million Americans. The don’t realize that many police and military are simply going to refuse to do that because they want to go home at night to their families and not is a body bag. I idiots who took an oath to uphold the constitution that are willing to do that will in fact be carted off to a morgue in a body bag because the American public is not going to be subject to tyranny from any source. I have said for a very long time that we are headed for a civil war and the Left better believe they are not going to be the winners.