If it was a country, it would be the population of Chad. If it was a language, it would be the fourteenth largest spoken in the world tied with Swahili. If it was state, it would be as large as Florida. What is this mysterious thing? It is the new US unemployment numbers, which in three weeks have risen to almost a shocking seventeen million people as CNBC reports amid the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis, making it the largest gains in history.
Jobless rolls continued to swell due to the coronavirus shutdown, with 6.6 million Americans filing first-time unemployment claims in the week ended April 4, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
That brings the total over the past three weeks to more than 16 million.
The most recent number represents a decline of 261,000 from a week ago, which was revised up by 219,000 to nearly 6.9 million.
A large contributor to that number was the 1.3 million people who dropped out of the labor force as they lost their jobs but were unable to look for work because of the coronavirus-related restrictions. Those numbers helped push up the headline unemployment rate from 3.5% to 4.4% and drove a more encompassing number that includes those not looking for work and the underemployed from 7% to 8.7%, the biggest one-month gain in the history of that measure. (source)
One must remember that these numbers are based on people receiving an actual unemployment check.
There are people who are not receiving checks who are also unemployed. They are not counted in these numbers.
This is what makes the crisis so severe. The actual numbers of people out of work are much higher.
People may be out of a job, but the question is not if they are out of a job, but if the jobs will come back, which is highly unlikely.
It has been estimated that fifty percent of the country in the future- as in the next year- could potentially be out of work.
These are Greece or Italy level unemployment numbers.
IF this was to happen, it would devastate the US economy in ways that would collapse the economic system and potentially incite revolutionary conditions- not with guns, but with ideologies as people beg for change.
The virus is a real threat, but the bigger threat is what the virus is doing and will continue to do to the common man, as by stripping him of his wealth and what was left of his perception of wealth, it will uncover the debt-laden rot of society, and force a social reorganization that was a long time overdue in its coming, and it will likely have long-term and deadly consequences.
If one has not already prepared, one needs to continue to do so while there is still time, for there will come a point when the time to prepare is no more. Likewise, this also includes in the safest possible way, to work as much as possible and earn money in preparation for an uncertain future where employment is not guaranteed and the pay rates will likely be significantly reduced, thus worsening the current situation for all.