10% of US Workers Lost Their Jobs in the Last 3 Weeks

You’d best start believing in science fiction dystopias.

I cannot stress enough the fact that the coronavirus hoax is going to lead to the biggest economic collapse in all of history.

The media is just reporting it dryly, without even attempting to address what this sort of data actually means.

What is most shocking is that they appear to actually be surprised by what has happened. As if they didn’t know that when they hyped up a flu virus as the end of the world and demanded that the entire economy be shut down, that this would have a disastrous outcome.

AP:

With a startling 6.6 million people seeking unemployment benefits last week, the United States has reached a grim landmark: More than one in 10 workers have lost their jobs in just the past three weeks to the coronavirus outbreak.

The figures collectively constitute the largest and fastest string of job losses in records dating to 1948. By contrast, during the Great Recession it took 44 weeks — roughly 10 months — for unemployment claims to go as high as they now have in less than a month.

Instead of addressing and expanding on that immediately, the Associated Press chooses to use their third and fourth paragraph to move on to how sad it is for the poor and oppressed third worlders and how whites need to give them money.

The damage to job markets is extending across the world. The equivalent of 195 million full-time jobs could be lost in the second quarter to business shutdowns caused by the viral outbreak, according to the United Nations’ labor organization. It estimates that global unemployment will rise by 25 million this year. And that doesn’t even count workers on reduced hours and pay. Lockdown measures are affecting nearly 2.7 billion workers — about 81 percent of the global workforce — the agency said.

Around half a billion people could sink into poverty as a result of the economic fallout from the coronavirus unless richer countries act to help developing nations, Oxfam, a leading aid organization, warned Thursday.

With paragraph five, we return to the homefront.

In the United States, the job market is quickly unraveling as businesses have shut down across the country. All told, in the past three weeks, 16.8 million Americans have filed for unemployment aid. The surge of jobless claims has overwhelmed state unemployment offices around the country. And still more job cuts are expected.

More than 20 million people may lose jobs this month. The unemployment rate could hit 15% when the April employment report is released in early May.

“The carnage in the American labor market continued unabated,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist for RSM, a tax advisory firm.

The viral outbreak is believed to have erased nearly one-third of the U.S. economy’s output in the current quarter. Forty-eight states have closed non-essential businesses.

A nation of normally free-spending shoppers and travelers is mainly hunkered down at home, bringing entire gears of the economy to a near-halt. Non-grocery retail business plunged 97% in the last week of March compared with a year earlier, according to Morgan Stanley. The number of airline passengers screened by the Transportation Security Administration has plunged 95% from a year ago. U.S. hotel revenue has tumbled 80%.

Because the U.S. government-mandated business shutdowns that are meant to defeat the virus have never brought the American economy to such a sudden and violent standstill, economists are struggling to assess the duration and severity of the damage.

“We’re just throwing out our textbooks,” said Beth Ann Bovino, chief U.S. economist at S&P Global Ratings.

That is a key point: these people have no idea what the consequences of this will be. They don’t have working models for this type of event.

One model is mentioned simply because it is the only model to mention.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, created at the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, projects that the U.S. economy will shrink at an astonishing 30% annual rate in the April-June quarter — even including the government’s new $2.2 trillion relief measure, the largest federal aid package in history by far. An economic contraction of that scale would be the largest quarterly plunge since World War II.

Thirty percent would be catastrophic. But there is no way it can sink that far without sinking further.

The United States functions on a debt economy, which is propped up by the use of the dollar as the global reserve currency. This was all working fine, and could potentially work indefinitely, assuming that you kept these moving parts moving, with everyone working selling things so they could buy things from other people who were working selling things.

When a percentage of the moving parts stop moving, the gears get jammed and everything just falls out. These people who lost their jobs won’t be able to buy things, so all the people working at jobs selling the goods and services they would have bought are going to be fired. This will be a cascading failure, and no one is going to know how bad it actually is until the country opens back up.

We’re at “b.”

I have predicted, and maintain, that it will be so bad that it will be worse than you can imagine. A staggering 67% of the US economy is “service” jobs, and the overwhelming majority of those are going to be gone. Certainly the small business side of the service economy will be totally wiped out. Big corporations will still have to sell you food, but anything beyond that is up in the air.

Ten percent unemployment in three weeks is simply staggering. It becomes much worse when you realize that many businesses have just put things on pause through this crisis, and so have not made the call to lay off their employees yet. Most of these firings are from businesses that have stayed open during the shut down, that have realized they are vastly overstaffed for this new reality.

All of this decadence is going to rot.

If a business is shut down and isn’t losing huge amounts of money by being closed – that is, if they don’t have large expenses when they are not operating – they are likely to wait to pull the trigger on layoffs, as they don’t know what is going on. The majority of people are in a panicked state over the virus. And no one is ready to admit to themselves what we’ve done, and what the consequences are going to be, even if they are capable of understanding it. Most people don’t understand that shutting down the economy collapses the economy completely.

All told, you are looking at at least a 50% unemployment rate, probably higher. The list of critical industries we have left in this country is really short. You need cops, some medical professionals and people to produce, transport and sell food. Beyond that, anything you think is necessary probably isn’t. Yes, people will still need their furnaces repaired, and various other random things you might think of. But we’re going into a time when people will put things like that off. If the furnace breaks, people might just get a space heater, or walk around their house covered in a blanket. If the kitchen sink breaks, they might just wash dishes in the bathroom.

Understand that most people are going to be struggling to keep a roof over their head in the first place, so those who don’t end up on the street are going to cut as many costs as they can to stay out of the government housing shelters that are going to spring up.

We are going to have to build Kowloon style mega-slum complexes.

The question now is whether or not the government is going to pull the trigger on putting us all in permanent lockdown in order to soften the blow of the economic collapse. This is what Zeke Emanuel and many other high-level “experts” are calling for, under the thin guise of saying that actually, coronavirus was not a nothing burger hoax somehow.

The fact that Donald Trump is continuing to go all in on the pandemic having been a real thing indicates that he’s going to go along with the idea of an indefinite shutdown so he doesn’t get blamed for the economic collapse. He is talking about opening up, but if the virus is really what they say it is – and he seems to be saying that it is – then we can’t open up ever again.

I’d say this is the most likely play. They are going to tell you there is so much risk from the virus that we can’t open anything up, that we have to indefinitely remain locked down as we wait for a vaccine. That way the government can deliver canned soup to you, and you have no idea what is going on, as they try to figure out how to send you to a war against China to reboot the economy.

Quarantine enforcement squad, circa 2022.