Chart of the day

Initial unemployment claims are starting to rise again.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Labor (pdf) reported that, during the week ending last Saturday, another 1.4 million American workers filed initial claims for unemployment compensation. Last week, it was 1.3 million.

Here is a breakdown of each week:

• week ending on 21 March—3.31 million

• week ending on 28 March—6.87 million

• week ending on 4 April—6.62 million

• week ending on 11 April—5.24 million

• week ending on 18 April—4.44 million

• week ending on 25 April—3.87 million

• week ending on 2 May—3.18 million

• week ending on 9 May—2.69 million

• week ending on 16 May—2.45 million

• week ending on 23 May—2.12 million

• week ending on 30 May—1.90 million

• week ending on 6 June—1.57 million

• week ending on 13 June—1.54 million

• week ending on 20 June—1.48 million

• week ending on 27 June—1.41 million

• week ending on 4 July—1.31 million

• week ending on 11 July—1.31 million

• week ending on 18 July—1.42 million

All told, 52.7 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past eighteen weeks.

To put that into some kind of perspective, I produced the chart above comparing the cumulative totals of the initial unemployment claims for the current pandemic compared to two other relevant periods: the worst point of the Second Great Depression (from early January to early May 2009) and the weeks immediately preceding the current depression (from the end of November 2019 to late March 2020).

As readers can see in the chart above, the differences are stunning: 11.4 million workers during the Second Great Depression, 3.9 million in the period just before the COVID crisis, and more than 52 million in the past eighteen weeks.

In the meantime, the United States continues to set daily records for new confirmed COVID-19 cases. Today, the three-day rolling average of new cases per million people in the United States reached 199 compared to 30.79 cases for the world as a whole.

We can therefore expect to see new waves of business closures, which in turn will mean more American workers furloughed and laid off, and therefore a steady stream of initial unemployment claims.

It is hard to imagine a worse combination to combat the fallout from the novel coronavirus pandemic than Republican governors, the administration of Donald Trump, and U.S. capitalism.