The Department of Labor releases unemployment claims on Thursday each week. We’ve been tracking those claims, which haven’t been pretty. Today brings more bad news. For the week ending April 11, almost 5.3 million Americans filed claims for unemployment.
Those filers bring the total number of people that have lost their jobs and filed for unemployment since the week ending March 14, when the coronavirus crisis first started striking the labor market, to 22.3 million Americans. This points to an unemployment rate that will be well into double digits, perhaps as high as 20% for April.
This is of course terrible news. The silver lining in the data is that claims have fallen the last two weeks. As of right now, the filing peak occurred the week ending March 28. Hopefully the worst is behind us.
Earlier today, we released state-specific data on unemployment claims from March 4 to April 4. The five states with the largest job losses are Michigan, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Hawaii. CNBC reported on this data today.
–Curtis Dubay, Senior Economist, U.S. Chamber of Commerce