Chart from an NYT article showing our current possible unemployment rate (numbers come in later) with previous back to 1930:
Back-of-the-Envelope Estimates of Next Quarter’s Unemployment Rate from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 24 mar 2020
In this blog post, we combine different types of statistics on industry and occupation composition to try to arrive at a back-of-the-envelope estimate for what the unemployment rate may be at the end of the second quarter of 2020.
At the end of Feb 2020, the labor force was 164.5 million people with an unemployment rate at 3.5% (5,76 million unemployed). The authors looked at two sources to combine to get their estimate for the second quarter: (1) jobs at high risk because they are not essential, remote-able, or salaried (66.8 million jobs) and (2) jobs with contact intensity (23.7 million jobs). From this, they came up with a second quarter unemployment rate at 32.1% (based on a range of 10.5%-40.6%).
Congress passed the $2 trillion rescue package back on Wed 25 Mar 2020. A lot of bad things got into the rescue package. Here’s a list. from The Washington Post, 30 Mar 2020.
Immense benefits to large corporations, Boeing, banking, large hotel chains, elimination of what few safeguards were left in the 2017 tax cuts, funding for abstinence-only education (?!?), loans managed by the SBA that are “a potential bureaucratic disaster in the making,” and general lack of oversight.
Little help for the middle/lower class.
My depression comes in waves, and yet I have not lost and most likely will not lose anything (financially). I really can’t imagine others’ misery right now.
Updated 9 Apr 2020
This week had another 6.6 million added to the unemployment numbers (weekly: 3.3, 6.6, and 6.6). Unemployment is now at 10%.