If this is “the recovery”, what are things going to look like once economic conditions start to deteriorate again? As you will see below, more than half of all households in some of our largest cities “are facing serious financial problems”, and Americans continue to file for unemployment benefits at a rate that the United States had never seen before prior to 2020. When 695,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits during a single week in 1982, it established a record which stood for nearly 38 years. But now we have been way above that old record for 25 weeks in a row. On Thursday, we learned that another 884,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…
Weekly jobless claims were worse than expected last week amid a plodding climb for the U.S. labor market from the damage inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Labor Department on Thursday reported 884,000 first-time filings for unemployment insurance, compared with 850,000 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The total was unchanged from the previous week.
Of course it is always important to look at the non-adjusted numbers, and according to those numbers we actually saw an increase over the previous week…
The Labor Department changed its methodology in how it seasonally adjusts the numbers, so the past two weeks’ totals are not directly comparable to the reports from earlier in the pandemic. Claims not adjusted for seasonal factors totaled 857,148, an increase of 20,140 from the previous week.
This is the second week in a row that the non-seasonally adjusted initial claims have risen.
That definitely wasn’t supposed to happen.
We are supposedly in a “recovery” right now, and things are supposed to be getting better.
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