Americans filed 3.8 million new jobless claims last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, pushing to 30.3 million the six-week claims tally as the coronavirus pandemic battered the economy.
The new report, which covers the week ending April 25, likely understates the total number of Americans who lost their jobs as the death toll from the disease climbed above that of the Vietnam war.
Self-employed workers who were made temporarily eligible last month for jobless benefits under the CARES Act are mostly left out of the count, as only 21 states have updated their systems to begin cutting unemployment checks to those workers. Eleven of those states implemented the program in just the past week.
The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on the economy as businesses across the country shut down and millions of workers were laid off or forced to stay at home. The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that the U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8 percent annual rate last quarter, which ended March 31, the sharpest one-quarter fall since the Great Recession, when GDP dropped 8.4 percent during the last three months of 2008.
Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics warned that GDP could plunge more than 30 percent in the next quarter, which spans April to June.
Goldman Sachs economists estimated that the pandemic will drive down incomes roughly 3 percent in 2020.
The coronavirus’ damage to the labor market will be clearer when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly employment report for the month of April next week. Economists expect that number to be close to 20 percent.
source https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/30/coronavirus-unemployment-claims-numbers-225603
Comments
Post a Comment