Over 50 Million Americans Have Now Filed For First-Time Jobless Benefits Since Lockdowns Began

Zero Hedge – by Tyler Durden

Despite the hope-restoring nonfarm payrolls “recovery” and the over-hyped bounce in ‘soft’ sentiment surveys (which are biased by their nature as diffusion indices to bounce back hard), for the seventeenth week in a row, over 1 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits for the first time (1.30mm was slightly worse than the 1.25mm expected).

Source: Bloomberg

That brings the seventeen-week total to 51.275 million, dramatically more than at any period in American history. However, as the chart above shows, the second derivative is slowing down drastically (even though the 1.30 million rise this last week is still higher than any other week in history outside of the pandemic)

Continuing Claims did drop very modestly but hardly a signal that “re-opening” is accelerating! And definitely not confirming the payrolls or sentiment data…

Source: Bloomberg

Broken down by state, it is perhaps not surprising that Florida which has seen a surge in new covid cases also had the biggest increase in initial claims, which rose by over 62K in the last week, more than double the 2nd biggest increase which was seen in Georgia. That said, a surge in covid cases does not explain why Texas, which has also seen a sharp increase in new cases, was the state with the 2nd biggest claims decline.

And as we noted previously, what is most disturbing is that in the last seventeen weeks, far more than twice as many Americans have filed for unemployment than jobs gained during the last decade since the end of the Great Recession… (22.13 million gained in a decade, 51.275 million lost in 17 weeks)


Finally, it is notable, we have lost 364 jobs for every confirmed US death from COVID-19 (137,419).

Was it worth it?



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