Thursday, March 26, 2020

JOBLESS CLAIMS SOAR AS PELOSI, BIDEN AND TRUMP PUSH FOR MORE FOREIGN WORKERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED FOR WALL STREET

Bullard Says Unemployment Could Rise to 30%

Photo by John Vachon/Library Of Congress/Getty Images
23 Mar 2020523
1:15
The unemployment rate in the U.S. could hit 30 percent, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said in Bloomberg News interview.
“This is a planned, organized partial shutdown of the U.S. economy in the second quarter. The overall goal is to keep everyone, households and businesses, whole,” Bullard said. “It is a huge shock and we are trying to cope with it and keep it under control.”
That would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression.
Bullard said he expects economic growth to plunge 50 percent in the second quarter but for the economy to bounce back later in the year, so long as the appropriate measures are taken by the fiscal and monetary authorities.
“I would see the third quarter as a transitional quarter,” Bullard said. The next six months, however, could be very strong. “Those quarters might be boom quarters,” he said.
Bullard also said the Fed was far from being “out of bullets,” as some Fed watchers have claimed.
“There is more that we can do if necessary,” he said. “There is probably much more in the months ahead depending on where Congress wants to go.”




Jobless Claims Soar to 3,283,000, Biggest Jump Ever

Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty Images
Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty Images
0:59

Jobless claims rose to 3,283,000 last week, reflecting only the first round of mass layoffs due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Jobless claims are considered the closest thing we have to a real-time indicator of economic conditions, reflecting claims from the prior week. Many pieces of economic data come out with lags of a month or more, which makes it had to rely upon them when the economy experiences a sudden shock.
The three million claims surge easily tops the 1982 record of 695,000.
Claims jumped in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Nine states reporting increases of at least 100,000 from the prior week.
The largest number of claims came from Pennsylvania, with 378,900.




Think Tank Estimates 14 Million Jobs Lost by Summer


March 25, 2020 Updated: March 25, 2020
FONT BFONT SText size

As policymakers and investors anxiously eye the Labor Department’s jobless claims report, due for release Thursday, a Washington-based think tank has made a dire forecast of 14 million jobs lost by summertime.
“Our best guess at this point is that the national economy could lose 14 million jobs by summer 2020,” said The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in a note that blamed the COVID-19 outbreak for the dismal figures.
“These estimates assume $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus—in other words, even with $1 trillion in stimulus, the job losses will be enormous,” the EPI wrote on March 25.
CCP VIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE
The 14-million forecast is an upwards revision over figures it published last week.
“Sadly, our predictions were likely too optimistic,” the think tank said in a report published March 25. The EPI noted that job loss estimates are “rapidly evolving, with new forecasts from different macroeconomic analysts being released on an almost daily basis.”




Bianca Medici (L), a corporate recruiter for CDM Media, speaks with job applicants during a National Career Fairs job fair in Chicago on April 22, 2015. The Labor Department releases weekly jobless claims on May 14, 2015. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
Bianca Medici (L), a corporate recruiter for CDM Media, speaks with job applicants during a National Career Fairs job fair in Chicago on April 22, 2015. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

EPI broke down their unemployment estimates by state. Percentage-wise, Nevada is projected to lose 14.2 percent of total private-sector employment. The state’s leisure, hospitality, and retail sectors account for over 40 percent of all private-sector jobs.
By absolute numbers of jobs lost, California is projected to have the most, at over 1.6 million. As a share of total private-sector employment, this number translates into 10.9 percent.
The think tank called for “at least $2.1 trillion in federal stimulus through 2020 to restore the country to reasonable economic health.”
Negotiators said Wednesday that U.S. senators and Trump administration officials reached an agreement on the massive economic stimulus bill.
The Senate will vote on the $2 trillion package later in the day and the House of Representatives is expected to follow suit soon after.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said Wednesday the package includes checks to help Americans pay bills during job layoffs related to the outbreak, expanded unemployment insurance, and emergency loans to small businesses.

‘Astronomical Increase’

The U.S. Department of Labor figures due Thursday are expected to shatter the old record for the greatest number of new unemployment claims filed in a single week.
Some economists project that the United States could see around 3 million new unemployment insurance claims when figures are released for the week of March 15-21. That would be around 12 times as many as the previous week and would triple the all-time record of 695,000 set in 1982.
“It’s going to be an astronomical increase,” said Constance Hunter, president of the National Association for Business Economists and chief economist at the accounting firm KPMG. “We don’t have any recorded history of anything like this.”

No comments: