Millions of Jobless Claims
4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. That’s on top of the 22 million from the past 4 weeks. All the job gains for the last decade have been wiped out. Poof, gone in 5 weeks.
The chart below is lagged by one week, so it’ll be much worse when a new chart is generated. States in the South and the MidWest States East of the Mississippi River are getting slammed. No wonder all those states WANT to reopen but we either bite the bullet now or deal with slow economic death, IMHO.
Jobless Claims, April 18, 2020
These folks are definitely not buying new cars, houses, or discretionary items for the foreseeable future. The only think keeping the markets at these levels is quantitative manipulations by the Fed. Might be time to buy some Bitcoin again.
Update
It’s frightening. This was May 2020.
May 2020 Jobless Rates
Its August now and the impolsion of the economy is still ongoing. THis is not my chart below, I got it from this Seeking Alpha article. It’s from July 11th and you can see the how insane the unemployment claims are.
Jobless Claims, July 11, 2020
The damage hasn’t worked it’s way through the enconomy yet. Luckily, Congress did do a small bailout for Main Street but then dropped the ball for the second bailout. We’re going to need a Main Street bailout or else everything will collapse IMHO.
The wealthy forget that it’s Main Street that buys a lot of their stuff. Sure they move piles of money around, but that can last only so long. Main Street needs to buy goods and services and have places to live. If you take them out, you take yourself out a quarter or two later.
Maybe I’m reaching too far into the future here but it’s downright scary right now. A coworker said that ‘cash is king’ right now and he’s 100% right.
If you have any savings, now’s a good time to hold them tight. If you’e been a strong saver over the year then you might get some good deals in the future.
Still, you should prepare yourself for a “depression-like” economy going forward. I say that because these job losses are staggering and haven’t worked their way through the economy yet.