The unemployment rate hit its highest level since the Great Depression.
The unemployment rate shot up to 14.7 percent in April, its highest level since the Great Depression, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
U.S. employers shed 20.5 million jobs in April as small businesses struggled to access hundreds of billions that Congress appropriated in an attempt to stem layoffs.
The dire, but expected, jobless rate all but confirms that the U.S. economy has entered a downturn that will eclipse the Great Recession of 2007-9 as the worst since the 1930s, even if recovery is swift, as few economists anticipate.
“It’s fully expected. There’s no surprise. Everybody knows this,” President Donald Trump said in initial reaction to the numbers on “Fox & Friends.” “Somebody said, ‘Oh, look at this.’ Well, even the Democrats aren’t blaming me for that. But what I can do is I’ll bring it back.”
The government data likely understates the damage, as the figures in the jobs report come from surveys conducted the second week in April. The nearly 33.5 million new unemployment claims filed over the past seven weeks suggest many more could be out of work, and the many self-employed workers and others newly eligible for unemployment benefits aren’t included in that figure. Thirty-one states have updated their systems to start paying benefits to this group, but 21 of those states implemented the new program only in the last two weeks.
The number is also likely an underestimate of the true scope of unemployment because of the way the survey works. To be counted among the unemployed, a worker must be looking actively for work, something many people aren’t doing because of the pandemic.
Large numbers of people also classified themselves as employed but absent from work, rather than unemployed on temporary layoff, artificially suppressing the unemployment rate by about five percentage points, said Ian Shepherdson chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.
“The plunge in payrolls ought to have lifted the unemployment rate to almost 20 [percent], other things equal,” he said.
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The unemployment rate shot up to 14.7 percent in April, its highest level since the Great Depression https://t.co/2fSFwgKEm5
— POLITICO (@politico) May 8, 2020
Would have been nice if the president’s first reaction to the horrific job numbers on live TV wasn’t to say “it’s not a big surprise” and “even the Democrats don’t blame me for it.”
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) May 8, 2020
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