Unemployment Claims Grow By 3.2 Million
Unemployment grew by 3.2 million last week, bringing total claims to 33.5 million over a seven week period.
These staggering numbers come in stark contrast to the long, slow, recovery we experienced previously. Lasting 11 years, and adding 23 million jobs, the Great Recovery (as economists like to call it) was the longest on record. Even a few months ago, unemployment fell to 3.5%, and claims hovered in the low 200,000s. Historically, unemployment claims average around 700,000 per week since 1967. This came to a grinding halt in March, when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic, and businesses around the world shut down.
April unemployment numbers are due out on Friday, and it is not going to be pretty. Early predictions put total unemployment for the month at 16% with 21 million jobs lost. ADP, the human resources software giant, released its monthly National Employment Report on Wednesday, showing 20 million job losses. The Labor Department report is expected to add another million on top of that. In comparison, unemployment peaked at 10% in 2009.
States that got hit the hardest were California, Florida, Georgia, Texas, and New York. California had the most unemployment claims overall (318,000!).
There is a silver lining amidst this scary news. Unemployment claims from the past week were the lowest since the week ending on March 14th, and considerably lower than the peak at 6.9 million, suggesting that the worst may be behind us. Hopefully with some states beginning to reopen, this trend continues.
Analysts predict that it will take a while to recover from this. A report from the San Francisco Federal Reserve points out that businesses would have to hire faster than they had in any prior recovery in order to reach pre-pandemic levels, which seems unlikely. Still, after the month we had, we will take any good piece of news that we can get.
