3/14/20 – Wall Street Journal – Nearly 3 Million Jobless Benefits Last Week – Seasonally adjusted new claims for unemployment were 2.981M in the week ending May 3. That brings cumulative new claims to around 36.5M.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Summary of new claims and running total
Here is my running tally of the new unemployment claims.
How much more of this will we see if L.A. County is closed for five months? Poverty by Joe Green is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
“With all certainty” the safer-at-home orders that have shut down the County of Los Angeles will be extended another three months, through August 15. That will make five months of crippling shutdown along with devastation to the economy along with expected damage to physical and emotional health and the consequent increase in excess mortality.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Had to check that report against other media sources to make sure that it wasn’t just one outfit making it up. Turns out it is not an April fool’s day joke.
The county’s Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer later issued a press release which said the goal is to test every citizen of the county every day. (These posts are going to start naming names for future accountability of the reasonably foreseeable, fully expected excess deaths that will take place.)
Current level of testing in LA County is running at 15,000 per day.
Testing in the United States is running about 150,000 per day.
Previous post explains the County of Los Angeles intends to continue the stay-at-home orders for another three months. That will make five months of the economy being shut down. Poor people falling behind five months on their rent and car payments. Five months of no revenue for most businesses.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
To highlight the devastation caused by the shutdown here are merely a few of the recent articles to consider for the consequences of said shutdown:
Increase in suicides
5/7/20- Breitbart – Report: Suicide rise from lockdowns to kill more than coronavirus in Australia – Researchers at a university in Australia estimate there will be a doubling of the suicide rate in the country because of the economic lockdown. If that horrible estimate is even close to correct, far more Australians will die by their own hand than are killed by coronavirus.
Ninety days ago the following stories would have been nothing more than the opener to a scary fantasy about some dystopian future. I am nowhere near creative enough to guess how bizarre the plot line would have been to incorporate these fantastical events.
Now approaching the end of the eighth week of California lockdown it is still hard to believe the stories are true instead of the figment of a creative sci-fi writer.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
The shutdown will be repeated every night in order to clean the cars.
Based on numerous comments I have read elsewhere, but for which I don’t have specific citations, this is apparently the first time the subway cars been disinfected since the coronavirus pandemic erupted.
If I get this straight after having read multiple articles, the subway cars had not been disinfected until 5/5/20, making them a major source of viral spread in the city.
This next story is more weird. It is sufficiently out there into the surreal realm that I had to cross check it with other articles to make sure it wasn’t fabricated. Turns out it’s actually real.
Required spreading of coronavirus into at-risk communities
For a number of years I have been tracking the monthly unemployment data. That information is shown in the graph above. Included is monthly information back to April 2010. Prior to that I only picked up a few data points.
This graph shows the hit from the Great Recession and the painfully slow recovery which followed.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Six different ways to measure unemployment
There are actually six different ways to calculated labor underutilization, all provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The economic devastation caused by the shutdown of the US economy means we need to start looking at these different indicators.
The above graph shows what is referred to as the U-3 and U-6 rates.
“What in the world are you talking about,” I hear you ask.
Shutting down the economy has predictable, expected consequences. One that became visible on Friday was 20 million jobs vaporizing in the last month which resulted in an expected soaring unemployment rate.
A ban on everything other than immediate emergency medical care has cratered revenue of hospitals bringing layoffs to the entire industry.
Finally, making unemployment benefits higher than the earning capacity of a large portion of people has the fully expected consequence of making people hesitant to return to work.
This discussion will be posted across several of my blogs.
5/8/20 – Wall Street Journal – April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7% – Thirty-three million people filing a first-time claim for unemployment drove the unemployment rate to 14.7%. Oh, lots of those new claims were filed after the cutoff for the April calculations.
A staggering 20.5 million jobs disappeared. Article points out the number of jobs destroyed are equal to all the job gains over the last decade.
Picture it this way – that is the equivalent of everybody who found a job over the last decade getting laid off.
Even the state government in California may be starting to realize that putting the economy in a deep freezer for an extended and unknown period of time might have some adverse consequences.
Just a few of the business casualties over the last few days:
New unemployment claims for week ending 5/2/20 are 3,169,000, seasonally adjusted.
The tally of new claims is 33.48 million since the economy was put in an induced coma.
That means about 1 out of every 5 people in the civilian labor force back in February are out of a job today.
I’m running out of words to describe how horribly the economy has been hit. Seem to have exhausted the adjectives that apply. We have a terrible mess and it is going to take a long time to fully recover from the lost jobs and even longer to recover consumer and business confidence.
This discussion will be posted across several of my blogs.
Expectations from economists interviewed by the WSJ, or perhaps we should say their wild guesses, are the flood of new claims will taper off in May. Will likely be months before the new jobs exceed the new unemployment claims. Will likely be years before new jobs offset the tidal waves of job losses in March, April, and May.
Summary of new claims and running total
I have prepared a running tally of the new unemployment claims, which is shown below.
Thousands upon thousands of needed health procedures were canceled in Ontario, Canada in order to make room for the massive surge of coronavirus patients which never arrived.
New study in Ontario estimates that 35 people are dead because their heart surgeries were postponed. There were 12,200 surgeries and other procedures postponed each week.
Friday of this week, 5/8, California will take the first baby steps to revive the state’s economy. Some retail stores will be able to provide curb-side delivery of products.
I don’t quite know how many people will order clothes online in order to pick them up at a store’s curb, but that is a first step.
At least half the value of a bookstore is browsing the shelves to see what book you really have to read right but that you previously didn’t even know existed.
Well, it’s a baby step.
Several articles describe the beginning here in the state. First article describes that government officials better start opening up quick or they will find the everyone already has done so.
A Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile successfully launches at 1 a.m. Nov. 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The missile was configured with a National Nuclear Security Administration test assembly in which a single unarmed re-entry vehicle traveled approximately 4,190 miles to their pre-determined targets near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. (U.S. Air Force photo/Joe Davila)
Did the Soviet Union, that now dead Evil Empire, have a first strike capability against US nuclear forces in 1990?
With extremely short notice, governors of Arizona and Tennessee extended the lockdown and economic shutdown in their states. California governor orders beaches closed in the county with lowest infection rate, leaving open beaches in county with three times higher rate.
Meanwhile, many other states are trying to allow their economies to re-start.
UNITED STATES (April 28, 2020) The U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels, and the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, the Thunderbirds, honor frontline COVID-19 first responders and essential workers with formation flights over New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia, April 28, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo by Lt. Cmdr. Aaron Hicks/Released)
The Air Force Thunderbirds and the Navy Blue Angels flight demonstration teams ha a series of joint flyovers of multiple metropolitan areas as a tribute to all the health care providers and first responders.
Here are some photos of their appearance over New York. Since the only photos on either theNavyor USAFwebsites are from the Navy, I’ll guess that pursuit plane was Navy.
The economic statistics are rolling out to show the initial impact of the shutdown of the economy.
The collateral effect the shutdown and isolation will have on deteriorating emotional and mental health along with increased mortality due to postponed or canceled medical treatment will take years to quantify.
New stats in last few days:
3.8 million new unemployment claims this week
New unemployment claims in six weeks are now equal to 18% of the people who were working in February
CBO expects unemployment rate to average 11% for 2020
4.8% annualized drop in GDP for first quarter
New claims for unemployment
4/30/20 – Department of Labor – Unemployment insurance weekly claims – Another 3,839,000 people filed an initial claim for unemployment in the week ending April 25.
Pictures in February 2016 at Minneapolis airport. Photo by James Ulvog.
The entire aviation industry, including airlines, plane manufacturers, engine producers, and maintenance, will be devastated from the pandemic and shutting down the economy.
4/27/20 – Wall Street Journal – ‘Welcome to Your Flight, Nathan.’ Traveling During a Pandemic Means Having the Plane to Yourself – My first, second, and third reaction was to chuckle when reading an article describing multiple commercial flights with only one passenger. The description of pilots making the standard welcoming announcement that greets the sole passenger by name is funny.
Then I shuddered in fear at the absolute devastation to the entire economy from most fights being almost empty. The financial destruction will require years of recovery.
Untold numbers of airline, ground transportation, hotel, restaurant, and food vendor companies are being shattered. Incalculable numbers of companies will not survive.
A lovely sight not many of us will get to see in the near future. Photo by James Ulvog.
Work that collapse back to the airplane manufacturers…
