Over 50 Million Americans Have Now Filed For First-Time Jobless Benefits Since Lockdowns Began | Zero Hedge
Despite the hope-restoring nonfarm payrolls “recovery” and the over-hyped bounce in ‘soft’ sentiment surveys (which are biased by their nature as diffusion indices to bounce back hard), for the seventeenth week in a row, over 1 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits for the first time (1.30mm was slightly worse than the 1.25mm expected).
That brings the seventeen-week total to 51.275 million, dramatically more than at any period in American history. However, as the chart above shows, the second derivative is slowing down drastically (even though the 1.30 million rise this last week is still higher than any other week in history outside of the pandemic)
Continuing Claims did drop very modestly but hardly a signal that “re-opening” is accelerating! And definitely not confirming the payrolls or sentiment data…
