“A decade of job gains undone in just four weeks.” That’s how Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, described the carnage of coronavirus fallout on the U.S. job market.
Slok said he is expecting Thursday’s initial jobless claims report to show 8 million Americans filed for weekly unemployment benefits last week.
If that happens, it will be the largest number ever and the fourth time that unemployment benefits have exceeded 1 million all four times will have happened in the past four weeks, Axios reported.
A number that big also means the U.S. will have shed more jobs in the past four weeks than it gained in 11 years since the end of the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
“Since the 2008-2009 recession ended, the U.S. economy created 22 million jobs,” Slok said, according to Morning Money on Politico. “Including our forecast for this week’s jobless claims shows that the U.S. economy over the past four weeks lost 25 million jobs. … A decade of job gains undone in just four weeks.”
Due to the delays of the U.S. response, the shutdowns could be much longer than a month, Ethan Wolff-Mann wrote for Yahoo Finance.
“We estimate that the increasingly stringent lock-down measures to combat COVID-19 in Europe and the U.S. are depressing the levels of consumer and business spending by more than anything we have seen since the Great Depression,” Deutsche Bank economists said in a recent note. “The peak-to-trough decline in … GDP is likely to be more than double that during the more prolonged Global Financial Crisis.”
Of the 22 million jobs created since the Great Recession, about 6.2 million were created between Donald Trump’s 2017 presidential inauguration through the end of November 2019, Vox reported.
However, Trump insisted otherwise during a December 2019 speech at a White House, when he credited his daughter, Ivanka Trump, with personally creating 14 million jobs over the same period.
Ivanka co-chairs a workforce policy board, working with private companies to get them to offer training opportunities to workers.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 70: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin goes solo to discuss the COVID-19 crisis. He talks about the failed leadership of Trump, Andrew Cuomo, CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and New York Mayor de Blasio.
“14 million people she’s gotten jobs for,” Trump said, referring to Ivanka. “Her goal when she started it two years ago was 500,000 jobs. She’s done over 14 million, so that’s really something.”
Predictions of a V-shaped recovery — one where the economy suffers a sharp economic decline but recovers quickly and strongly — are overly optimistic, according to Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
“Barring some health-care miracle,” the U.S. can expect “waves of flare-ups, controls, flare-ups and controls,” Kashkari said during a CBS interview.
