Unemployment numbers may get worse than during the great financial crisis depression circa 1929-1933ish. There’s been a stream of news about layoffs everywhere, so that could be a sign of how fast things are moving.
During the “big one” almost a century ago, a lot of people started losing jobs from the start of 1929 until the New Deal. The official numbers showed the rate went from 3.2% to 24.9% over four years. (see: Historical US Unemployment Rate by Year)
Will we see the metric grow from 3.5% (2019) to 30% in a matter of a few months? As per QZ’s article:
In a Sunday interview with Bloomberg, Bullard [president of the St. Louis branch of the US Federal Reserve Bank] predicted that the unemployment rate will reach 30% in the second quarter, and gross domestic product will fall by 50%.
US unemployment was at its worst during the peak of the Great Depression in 1933, when the jobless rate spiked to 24.5%. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, US unemployment peaked at 10.2% in October 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
(Read here: Coronavirus could leave 30% of US workers jobless, Fed president says)
We are waiting for March numbers in April:
CNBC:
Economists expect April to be the first reporting month when the damage starts to show up.
Forecasts for that month range from 500,000 to 5 million.
The worst month during the financial crisis saw nonfarm payrolls decrease by 800,000.
…
Upcoming weekly jobless claims will shatter the standards set even during the worst points of the financial crisis and the early-1980s recession, with Bank of America forecasting a total of 3 million when the number is released Thursday.
While the headline unemployment rate is highly unlikely to approach the 24.9% during the Great Depression, it very well could be the highest in almost 40 years
As shared by @saf (in The Great Lockdown Recession - yes we're here - #124 by saf) - take a look at these blog posts that keep track of unemployment numbers per state in the US: Coronavirus storyline #10: unemployment – The Irregular Economic Review
22 March 2020:
For the 29 states I have data, there is a total of 1,822,979 new unemployment claims over the past week. However, of the 29 states, some states only report claims for a few days. If I assume the average claims of the non-reported days are the same, this comes out to 2,800,000 claims for the week for the 29 states. This is about 2.5% of the total civilian labor force in these states. Applying this number to the non-reporting states, this gives a total of 4,146,920 new unemployment claims for the week.
During the last recession the US unemployment reached 9.9%:
(posted by @Prince here: The Great Lockdown Recession - yes we're here - #7 by Prince)
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