3.28M file for U.S. jobless benefits

A few things to note:<p>1. These figures are only new claims as of 3&#x2F;21, so the numbers will get worse.<p>2. This is ~2% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce.<p>3. This is nearly 5x (!) the prior record of 671K new jobless claims from 1982, and redefines the scale for jobless claims. [1]<p>4. This does not account for the countless gig workers that are part of the modern economy that likely did not file for unemployment since they were not covered prior to the passing of the senate bill last night.<p>This goes to show just how sharp of an impact the coronavirus pandemic has had relative to past recessions. Even the &#x27;08 Financial Crisis took MONTHS to unravel.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;ICSA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;ICSA</a>

Semi tangent, about dealing with mass unemployment.<p>I like to think this event changes people&#x27;s perspective on folks out of work in the US. There&#x27;s a lot of recrimination, and even self loathing about being poor or out of work in the US. It doesn&#x27;t seem based in reality and certainly isn&#x27;t helpful.<p>Perhaps it is time we realize that much like a pandemic things in this world change fast and we need to be able to help folks who are out of work pick up skills quickly &#x2F; retrain (and maybe retrain employers that people with a &#x27;different&#x27; resume might actually be able to do other jobs) so that they can get back on their feet.<p>Maybe it won&#x27;t be a pandemic but things are changing fast whole industries of people find themselves offshored, jobs change, etc. I think we need to plan for &#x2F; get comfortable with the idea that on a smaller scale we should be ready to deal with such things dynamically over the course of people&#x27;s lives with retraining, support for it, and etc. And maybe a workforce with a variety of experiences will be better for it.

And this is just the start.<p>While I think the US response to Corona was slower than the response in my country I feel the US is the only country that&#x27;s seriously discussing economic repercussions and debating the medical experts.<p>In EU (at least in my country) it&#x27;s doctors running things and we are in &quot;stop the pandemic at all cost&quot;. Everyone is in panic due to Italy situation. But doctors are only trained to see the medical side of the picture - and there is a point at which this approach to fighting the virus is going to have worse consequences than a full blown pandemic itself - I don&#x27;t see anyone publicly discussing this point around here.

Being a sole proprietor &#x2F; contractor right now feels hopeless. Nobody is spending money with me right now, projects on hold, no possible way of filing for unemployment. It&#x27;s worrisome.<p>Thankfully my wife is still working - but she&#x27;s an administrator at a Nursing Home and people there are starting to get tested - and she&#x27;s panicking. They are days from having no nurses. She&#x27;s worried about cleaning crews being sick. She&#x27;s worried about bringing it home. Luckily they have a stockpile of supplies, BUT THIS WHOLE THING IS ABOUT TO BLOW UP!<p>The problem is that the tests of their employees are taking UP TO 10 DAYS to come back. They are sending home nurses for this long just to wait and see if they are all going to be exposed, their residents too.<p>Anyone in their facility who may be sick is being sent home for 14 days. There will be nobody left to take care of the elderly, who may also get sick.<p>People are worried about dying themselves, or the people they care for dying.<p>I&#x27;m confident we are 10 days from hearing about Nursing Homes and Nurses in Nursing Homes everywhere getting sick and dying in massive numbers.

And as an econ&#x2F;business reporter points out, this should be seen as the lower bound on the true number of lost job, because there are a lot of reasons people didn&#x27;t file, including confusion, overwhelmed systems, and many lost jobs not qualifying: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bencasselman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1243147516784324608" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;bencasselman&#x2F;status&#x2F;1243147516784324608</a>

&gt; A week ago, he said he had “a good middle-class job” which paid him $35.50 an hour plus health care and retirement benefits. Now he is struggling to figure out how he’ll pay a $300 electric bill and $1,000 in rent for his townhouse. He also lost his health insurance.<p>You make $35.5&#x2F;hour in (I suppose?) a stable job but if the work stops for a week, you struggle with a $300 bill? I know some people are living paycheck to paycheck but starting from a certain income you should build a safety net. What about your IRA? What about your credit score? What about small investments?<p>Looks like some people are living $ to $ without leaving any money aside. This might be what is going to make this even harder for the economy.

A staggering number, and unprecedented in the modern era.<p>I&#x27;m not in the US or an America, but my (retired), Father is and for the sake of the people around him and his family I hope this is the point where the American political system - and Republicans in particular - realise that their ideologies are dead.<p>In the UK we saw an Old-Etonian Tory Prime Minister in the space of a couple of weeks:<p>- Effectively nationalise a huge chunk of private industry by offering to subsidise 80% of all salaries up to £30k&#x2F;year<p>- Delay tax payments for businesses, and offer up to 15% of GDP in loans and grants to help keep them alive<p>- Renationalise the train industry (privatising it and others was a hallmark of Thatcher&#x27;s period in power)<p>- Accept that their planned immigration policy post-Brexit is now probably dead in the water because who knew that &quot;low skilled workers&quot; like cleaners and agricultural workers would be useful?<p>- Severely curtail free movement and enterprise by shutting every pub, restaurant, cinema, theatre and cafe across the UK as well as almost every shop that isn&#x27;t a pharmacy or food shop<p>- Become champion supporters of an NHS they were - until recently - trying to sell bit off of<p>Politics here has changed forever, and likely for the better (assuming the sanctions on free movement and enterprise are temporary and not a back door for more draconian measures). For the sake of the most vulnerable in America, I hope it&#x27;s the same there too.<p>And maybe - just maybe - it&#x27;s time everybody took another look at the UBI debate, again.

How is our social system so fragile?<p>I mean seriously - thousands of years and wireless comms and rockets to the moon and not only do we forget to prepare for a virus (something that had happened routinely throughout our history) but when it hits and people have to stay at home for a few weeks the economy falls down and leaves millions of people who want to work unable to do so.

Anecdotal but my company is hiring 2x support and 2x QA, yesterday alone we went from receiving 5-10 applicants a day to 53. I just got into work and there is already 21 from last night.

To make it sure that I understand it correctly: this is not the total number of unemployed people, but the number of people who became unemployed recently and now file the forms? Then that number is gigantic, wow.

As you look at this story, please keep some basic numbers in mind:<p>1. US Population: 329,433,166 (as of 3&#x2F;25&#x2F;2020)<p>2. Employed: 158,130,000 (approx. 48% of population)<p>3. Unemployed: 8,787,000 (approx. 5.6% of employed)<p>Note:<p>Take these numbers with a grain of salt as US Population is only as good as the Census Reporting itself. The Employed # is an estimate based on 155.76 million factually employed in 2018 and does not include self-employed, contractors, gig workers etc.<p>Sources:<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;popclock&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.census.gov&#x2F;popclock&#x2F;</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;269959&#x2F;employment-in-the-united-states&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;269959&#x2F;employment-in-the...</a><p>3. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deptofnumbers.com&#x2F;unemployment&#x2F;us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deptofnumbers.com&#x2F;unemployment&#x2F;us&#x2F;</a>

Just to illustrate how absurd this number is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EUCTISVXQAcIKEb?format=png&amp;name=large" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;EUCTISVXQAcIKEb?format=png&amp;name=...</a>

The thing about the current situation is that there is still no end in sight and it feels like we are just at the beginning stages of a tough struggle.<p>Thankfully tech seems to be holding up in terms of employment for the moment, but we have stopped hiring as well so who knows what may come next. Not every tech can withstand or even benefit from the current crisis.

I grew up with the puritanical mindset of: &quot;Your intrinsic worth as a human is the money you earn; because the money you earn is from how hard you work; and how hard you work is a reflection of your intrinsic Virtue.&quot;<p>Thus I grew up in a family that loathes the unemployed. I really hope -- though I have grave doubts -- that this event gets through to them, so that they can have some personal growth, too.

Canada is at 1 million or about 5% of our population. And it&#x27;s only going to go up from here.<p>I have no idea how they are doing to handle any of this, having that percentage of your population on EI is going to hurt.

Most, if not all (?) will lose their healthcare. Horrible situation to be in during a pandemic.

Won&#x27;t know for sure until Apr 03 (The Day BLS releases the official unemployment rate for March) but this may very well trip the Sahm recession indicator, which has correctly predicted&#x2F;detected every US recession back to 1950 (If it&#x27;s been further backfitted I can&#x27;t find the data).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;SAHMCURRENT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;SAHMCURRENT</a>

3.28 million? Really?<p>With the lockdowns of retail, hospitality, etc. in Australia, a country of 25 million total, we&#x27;ve seen nearly something north of 800,000 unemployed (temporarily or permanently). This can&#x27;t be an accurate figure, surely!

For those playing at home, that&#x27;s 3.28 million people who probably don&#x27;t have access to health care now. Many probably didn&#x27;t before due to the nature of their jobs, but it&#x27;s going to be interesting to watch the cry for bailout of hospitals from the same politicians who are completely fine otherwise with people going without healthcare.

The economical impact of COVID-19 on people&#x27;s lives will be far more severe than the biological one.<p>Hopefully this won&#x27;t discourage governments from taking appropriate action once a more lethal pandemic comes.

Things that Coronavirus is teaching us:<p>-the people who are <i>actually</i> vital to make the economy are grocery clerks, doctors, nurses, teachers and other carers, but not corporate CEOs, who are ultimately just dead weight.<p>-money is imaginary and they can print as much as they want.<p>-the people in power right now would rather have the stock market crash and watch you and a million other Americans die than give healthcare to everyone, even in the middle of a pandemic. How much would it help to have a centralized, organized response where everyone gets tested early right now? But it’s impossible, because it would mean giving health care to poor people.<p>-capitalism is a beast that dies if it cannot grow. People work mostly to pay rent and debts. They pay rent so the landlord can pay the mortgage. The bank has already lent out the money they expect to get from people paying the mortgage- so if property owners don’t pay their monthly bill, the whole financial system has a heart attack. Same thing with corporate debt. The corporation is assuming that you’re going to buy crap you don’t need. If you don’t, then they can’t pay their massive debts and again the whole system seizes up. So the primary reason we spend all our useful hours at work is so that we can make numbers bigger at the bank. And all of these debts, ultimately, are paid off on the backs of the working class. But the whole system can’t be reduced, or paused, or even slowed down- it <i>must</i> grow exponentially more and more, consuming more and more resources forever, or else it craters in a devastating crash and cannibalizes itself on the way down.

Welcome to the Great Depression of the 21st century.

The US federal and state governments have implemented policies that have forced a large number of businesses to close temporarily. A business that is closed can&#x27;t pay it&#x27;s employees, so naturally it would have to lay them off.<p>If tomorrow we found a cure and got the all clear to return to life as normal, how many of the 3.28M would be re-hired immediately? What we need is a distinction between being laid off temporarily and being laid off permanently. That would give us a clearer picture of the real economic impact.<p>We need a new metric. The senate stimulus bill should have included a new classification and support for workers temporarily put on unpaid leave.

And the stock market loves it? I’m so confused.

That’s about 1% of the US population to put it in perspective

Someone can correct me on this if I am wrong.<p>Most of the unemployment is people on the lower end of the spectrum in terms of financials. Most of them are in the service sector. The middle of the pack group did not suffer because of this (yet). Whenever this clears the service sector, travel, restaurants, hospitality etc will bounce back very quickly. So all the people that lost their jobs could just get them back and the recovery will be sharp.<p>However, the kick in the nuts will be if the virus drags on for months. Then it becomes uncertain.

What is the process for freelancers to get unemployment? I think that was mentioned in the new stimulus?

And yet - S&amp;P 500 reacts with a sharp climb and most investors already think we hit the bottom two days ago.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;6BC8F" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;6BC8F</a>

For context, the previous record was ~680K in the early 1980s.

My initial response to this is... duh. How many governments have ordered people <i>not to work</i>. Is it surprising that all those people would then file for <i>not working</i> benefits?<p>Of course not. Its an artificial unemployment spike (provoked by very real, fundamental forces in the world i.e. covid-19).<p>It will be VERY interesting to watch how state governments react to this spike. The federal government has monopoly money but state governments are VERY MUCH concerned with debt levels.<p>We&#x27;ll see how long these isolation orders last. States will have to chose between unemployment, pensions, welfare programs, transit operations, etc. I wonder who gets the axe first. You could very easily see states go bankrupt and whole classes of the social safety net depleted for a generation.

More than anything right now people are going to have a very strong appetite for financial security. It&#x27;s about time we reconsider &#x27;working for 50 weeks to pay for 52&#x27; as a viable means to have that security.

The stock rises after the announcement...

If the US was smart (big if...)<p>The pandemic quarantine will accumulate pent up demand, or at least a desire to consume once it is &quot;over&quot;.<p>A good economic recovery would provide enough money to fund this demand and immediately reward rehiring of people to previous levels.<p>But this will be a series of discredited supply-side measures until (perhaps) a Keynesian friendly democrat is in office.

Isn&#x27;t it meaningful that the cause of this particular unemployment is very unique, in that it wasn&#x27;t caused by a weak economy, but by the government artificially closing the businesses temporarily?<p>Theoretically, once everything starts to open back up, won&#x27;t there be a similarly sized surge in &quot;new jobs&quot; so to speak?

At least in New York the state dept of labor unemployment page is broken under the server stress and untold numbers of people haven’t been able to login and file claims.

Canada wins 500,000 jobs lost at 10% of the population. Oil and gas prices is a double whammy.

Reminder: we spend 700 Billion on our military. No reason that can&#x27;t be reduced to provide aid if needed.

A year from now, will we look back and say it was worth the suffering for something 5x as bad as the flu? (based on Germany’s numbers, which are more fully accounting for those with mild symptoms)<p>Shows how important testing randomly is, if the denominator is low because you are only testing those in the hospital, it looks like the second coming of the Spanish flu.

Everyone should expect the stock market to thrive off this data today...

Stock market up, Trump says churches will be full of people in two weeks. I&#x27;m watching a movie it seems

I wonder would a vaccine be able to reverse this instantly? Can you imagine. It&#x27;s going to be a bumpy few months.

My biggest concern is that we aren&#x27;t working on the infrastructure and cultural shift that is going to be needed to have a return to normal.<p>The endgame of covid-19 is herd immunity, which requires either 30-60% of the population infected and recovered, or it requires a vaccine. Realistically both are probably 9+ months out: vaccines are slow to develop, and almost every governor has proven they&#x27;d rather shut down everything than see hospitals be overloaded.<p>In other words, for the next 6-12 months we have two choices:<p>(a) Public life sees a boom-bust pattern of sickness, where we open things back up, then a new outbreak of infection happens, and everything shuts down again for 2-6 weeks.<p>(b) We aggressively fight off our initial outbreak, then build infrastructure to quickly identify and contain all infections. We gently reopen life back to a kind-of-normal states of permanent semi-quarantine until a vaccine arrives.<p>In my opinion, (b) is clearly the optimal approach. And yet we haven&#x27;t even begun working on the infrastructural and cultural changes needed to support pre-herd-immunity public life.<p>We need mass production of face masks and a culture where it is unacceptable to not wear a face mask in public, particularly crowded locations and public transit.<p>We need every building, every bus and train, every tourist attraction, testing every visitor with a contactless thermometer. If you have a fever you get a covid-19 test.<p>To support allowing non-remote-capable work to resume, any jobs that are remote capable should remain remote until we have herd immunity. More people leaving their homes means higher risk of an outbreak, and when an outbreak happens non-remote-capable employees are the ones screwed over.<p>As much as I distrust the CCP and China&#x27;s official numbers, it just takes one glance on the measures being taken in China to prove that China is a thousand times more serious about containing this virus than we are, and that&#x27;s going to play in their favor in getting things back to normal. Here&#x27;s an eye-opening video on some of the steps Nanjing has taken to prevent an outbreak:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YfsdJGj3-jM&amp;feature=youtu.be</a><p>The simple fact is we&#x27;re lacking the national leadership to make an effective response to this disease.

Recession will take place in every country next year so expect that the number of jobless people will strike up during and after the pandemic.

And this is only the beginning... if you look for projections (or run your own [1]), we will need a hard nationwide shutdown for at least 2-3 months (not 2 weeks) for this to not kill a million plus Americans.<p>I suspect even if a shutdown is lifted, when people start seeing body counts it’s not like they’ll return to traveling or eating out.<p>We’d probably need to see an anti-body test first and&#x2F;or vaccine. This is going to take years to recover from.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;austingwalters.com&#x2F;covid-19-vs-the-economy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;austingwalters.com&#x2F;covid-19-vs-the-economy&#x2F;</a>

You know how to fix the problem with those record layoffs though right? First cut all funding to social safety net programs and use that money to give tax cuts to the rich, who then don&#x27;t even pretend that trickle down economics works and instead set up a fund for the public to donate to help those who need relief because fuck you I got mine.

&quot;The great American job machine&quot;<p>The whole previous decade needs to come with an asterisk when talking about job growth. Looking at job participation rates and those that have stopped looking completely from BLS paints a completely different story. The pandemic obviously isn&#x27;t making things better, but it&#x27;s just always been an afterthought when talking about job growth.

For this not to bankrupt the nation and retard our growth for the next twenty-five years, we need to all go back to work, today. Even if coronavirus kills a million people, the rest will probably be fine in the long term. If we shut down the economy, three hundred million will be affected. This &quot;flattening the curve&quot; business is clearly not worth it.<p>You cannot shut the economy. There is only so much we can borrow. The fed is buying debt right and left, and the government surely doesn&#x27;t want to borrow money and remove that liquidity. So, the fed will buy t-bills instead and probably have to inflate the currency to pay for it all. We could end up spending orders of magnitude than 2 trillion on more hand-outs, so we could end up with another period of stagflation. Unless we want to retard our growth and prosperity for the next 25 years, we all have to go back, consequences aside. Vulnerable people need to stay home for months until this blows over; it&#x27;s not the responsibility of the rest of us to lose our jobs for the sake of a few others. Doctors say we have to stay home, but as doctors, they naturally want to prioritize health. As the saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.<p>Like many other problems, there are diminishing returns as we approach either extreme of opening the economy or shutting it down. This extreme clearly isn&#x27;t working. The at-risk million stay home; everyone else goes to work.