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* WaPo…
More than 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, according to the Labor Department, a signal that the tidal wave of job losses continues to grow during the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s the fifth-straight week that job losses were measured in the millions. From March 15 to April 18, 26.5 million have probably been laid off or furloughed. The number of jobs lost in that brief span effectively erased all jobs created after the 2008 financial crisis. Jobless figures on this scale haven’t been seen since the Great Depression.
The new weekly total comes on top of 22 million Americans who had sought benefits in previous weeks, a volume that has overwhelmed state systems for processing unemployment claims. Economists estimate that the national unemployment rate sits between 15 and 20 percent, much higher than it was during the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009. The unemployment rate at the peak of the Great Depression was about 25 percent.
The new weekly jobless claims figure came around economist predictions, which were expected “to be staggering, but not growing, which is a small mercy,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter. For comparison, 5.2 million people filed unemployment claims for the week ending April 11.
*** UPDATE *** Slowing down a bit, but still a ton of applications…
While weekly numbers keep decreasing, Illinois residents continue to file for unemployment benefits at record-high numbers due to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Illinois residents filed 102,736 claims for unemployment benefits last week, according to preliminary numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s an about 27% decrease from the revised total of 141,160 for the week ending April 11, according to Illinois Department of Employment Security numbers on April 16.
Illinois received more than 757,000 initial unemployment claims from March 1 to April 18, according to state data. That’s more than the total number of initial claims for all of 2019 – which was more than 476,000 – and more than four times the amount of claims filed in the first two months of the 2008 Great Recession, per the state data.
posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 9:41 am
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People just don’t seem to get the depth of the crisis we are in. See the stock market. This is going to be a very long, hard road back to economic growth. Especially because we don’t know when things will get back to “normal.” You can open up the economy all you want, but if people start dying in larger numbers, more people will stay home and for longer time period. There is no getting back to “normal” maybe ever.
Comment by Ducky LaMoore Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 9:50 am
And the stock market continues to climb, Dow up over 1.5% on this news. Next headline, “Giant asteroid predicted to split earth in two, DJIA up 3%”.
Comment by Six Degrees of Separation Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 9:52 am
Six Degrees of Separation-
If I’m allowed an anecdote-
I went to the two places in my tiny hamlet that sells quality chainsaws, looking for a smaller one for pruning. Both had their inventories more than halved from sales. Both owners stated they can’t keep equipment on the shelves.
Again, this isn’t cheap Walmart saws, these are Stihl and Echo.
Someone has money.
Comment by efudd Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 9:58 am
=Someone has money.=
Always.
Comment by JS Mill Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 10:50 am
Ducky, ever is a long time. The roaring 20’s followed the Spanish Flu of 1918. This is very painful right now, and can indeed feel pretty hopeless some days. However, there are a lot of smart people out there working on real solutions. Someone or some team of people will figure it out. If nothing else, hopefully this will result in an international disease control effort that actually works.
Comment by SSL Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 12:37 pm
You’ve also got to factor in all the self employed folks who tried to file but the system wouldn’t let them. I, as a stateworker, who speaks bureaucratic, tried to help my friend the other day and I failed. She gave up saying that she’d try again in May when they have the system up for the self employed folks.
Comment by Honeybear Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 12:53 pm
“who speaks bureaucratic”
Probably not the correct dialect of bureaucratic. Different agencies have their own flavor of bureaucratise.
Having previous experience with IDES, they are their own brand of bureaucrat. Make the Vogons in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy look like pikers.
Comment by Huh? Thursday, Apr 23, 20 @ 1:55 pm