Waiting For The Other Shoe To Drop…
Do you feel like another major crisis could erupt at any moment? If so, you are certainly not alone. Here in 2020, it has just been one thing after another, and we have come to expect the unexpected. Right now, so many people that I am hearing from are anticipating that more big trouble is just around the corner, but as we wait for “the other shoe to drop”, economic conditions all over the United States continue to rapidly deteriorate. For example, on Thursday we learned that the number of initial claims for unemployment benefits last week was the highest in four months…
The US job market continues to suffer, and Thursday brought more bad news. Another 885,000 people filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week — an increase from the week prior and higher than the 800,000 claims that economists were expecting.
The latest figures, which are adjusted for seasonal factors and reported by the Labor Department, are particularly grim since last week’s numbers were revised up to 862,000. And even before the revision, that week had been the highest level since mid-September.
This isn’t how the numbers were supposed to be trending.
For four of the past five weeks we have seen the number of new unemployment claims go up, and experts are warning that we should expect things to get even worse as we head into winter…
‘US weekly jobless claims continue to head in the wrong direction,” Edward Moya, an analyst at the currency trading firm OANDA, wrote in a research note.
‘The labor market outlook is bleak as the winter wave of the virus is going to lead to more shutdowns.”
Could we soon see more than a million Americans filing new claims for unemployment each week like we did earlier in the pandemic?
To put this in perspective, the previous all-time record prior to 2020 was just 695,000, and that old record was set all the way back in 1982.
We absolutely shattered that record once COVID-19 started spreading widely in the United States, and we have been above that old record every single week throughout this entire pandemic.
Just think about that.
