Historic record in sight for US jobless claims (several million)
US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — The coronavirus pandemic is having a devastating impact on the economy. We saw this earlier this week with the European PMI indices for March, which turned out to be simply catastrophic, with the worst fall ever recorded for the composite PMI of the euro zone.
Today, another key statistic covering the impact period of the coronavirus will be published, this time in the United States: The weekly jobless claims for the week of March 15-21.
Several million Americans have already been laid off or laid off due to the coronavirus crisis – and millions more may lose their jobs in the coming weeks.
According to consensus estimates, the number of new jobless claims is expected to reach a record 2.5 million, up from 281,000 the previous week, according to economists.
“The first state publications indicate an almost unthinkable increase of 2 to 3 million” of unemployed, wrote the economists of BMO Capital Markets to their customers. Some analysts post even higher forecasts, at 4 million.
Today’s numbers could roughly triple those of the old historic record of 695,000 in 1982.
In addition, it will not be a simple “mishap” for the statistics, since it is certain that new requests will continue to skyrocket for the next few weeks and beyond, with a containment of more and more widespread in the United States.
If so, the number of unemployed Americans could quickly exceed the previous record of 15.3 million in 2009 according to some economists.
It is therefore to be expected that the unemployment rate, currently at 3.5%, the lowest for 50 years, will also soar. It could very quickly exceed 10% according to calculations.
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The article is written and prepared by our foreign editors from different countries around the world – material edited and published by Ordo News staff in our US newsroom press.
