Just when you hoped or thought things could not get worse on the jobless and unemployment news, they did. The U.S. Department of Labor reported on Thursday morning that weekly jobless claims hit a whopping 6.606 million for the week ending April 4, 2020.
The consensus estimate was closer to 5 million, although the unemployment offices have been overwhelmed with applications and there was a wide range of estimates.
The prior week’s report was revised upward to 6.867 million from the preliminary report of 6.648 million. All in all, that’s about 17 million or so weekly jobless claims combined over the past three weeks. The four-week average was 4.265 million.
According to the Labor Department, the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was up three points to 5.1% for the week ending March 28. The advance number for continuing claims, those taking benefits for more than a week, rose sharply by almost 4.4 million to 7,455,000.
This continuing claims report comes with a one-week lag, but the Labor Department reported that this marked the highest level of seasonally adjusted insured unemployment in the history of its reporting, as the previous high was 6.635 million during the prior recession during May of 2009.
It was difficult to expect that this week’s Labor Department report would have much in the way of good news. That said, the worse the news, the greater chances that additional economic stimulus will become available. That latter scenario may at least help to explain how and why the stock market has recovered half of its losses in the past two weeks.
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