Most U.S. States Have ‘Reopened’ Their Economies, So Why Does Unemployment Continue To Spiral Out Of Control?
Most U.S. States Have ‘Reopened’ Their Economies, So Why Does Unemployment Continue To Spiral Out Of Control? by for The Economic Collapse Blog
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Once states started to “reopen” their economies, the tsunami of unemployment was supposed to end. But instead, we continue to see Americans lose jobs at a pace that is far beyond anything we have ever seen before in all of U.S. history. All the way back in 1982, there was a week when 695,000 Americans filed initial claims for unemployment benefits, and that all-time record was never broken until this year. Of course we have seen monster number after monster number here in 2020, and we just learned that last week another 1.877 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits…
Filings for unemployment insurance claims totaled 1.877 million last week in a sign that the worst is over for the coronavirus-related jobs crisis but that the level of unemployment remains stubbornly high.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for 1.775 million new claims. The Labor Department’s total nevertheless represented a decline from the previous week’s upwardly revised total of 2.126 million.
So even though more than 40 million Americans had already lost their jobs in 2020, there were still enough people losing their jobs last week to surpass the old record from 1982 by more than a million.
Just think about that.
Overall, a grand total of 42.6 million Americans have now lost their jobs since the pandemic began, and that makes this the largest spike in unemployment in all of U.S. history by a very wide margin.
And when the monthly employment report comes out on Friday, the official U.S. unemployment rate is expected to surpass 20 percent…
The numbers came the day before the Labor Department releases its nonfarm payrolls report for May. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones are expecting a decline of 8.3 million and a 20.5% unemployment rate, more than double the highest previous level since the Great Depression.
By now, everyone pretty much understands that the official unemployment rate greatly understates the true level of unemployment in this country.
But even if we take it at face value, the unemployment rate is now far higher than it has been at any point since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
With tens of millions of Americans now out of work, a lot of people are now finding it extremely difficult to pay the bills. The following comes from an NPR article entitled “Millions Of Americans Skip Payments As Tidal Wave Of Defaults And Evictions Looms”…
Americans are skipping payments on mortgages, auto loans and other bills. Normally, that could mean massive foreclosures, evictions, cars repossessions and people’s credit getting destroyed.
But much of that has been put on pause. Help from Congress and leniency from lenders have kept impending financial disaster at bay for millions of people. But that may not last for long.
An “economic recovery” was supposed to have started by now, but that isn’t happening.
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