Hoo Boy!

Jobless claims just rose by ⅓ over last week.

When you consider that the full impact of COVID-19 wasn't seen last week, this is alarming, particularly since last week was only the leading edge of the disruption from the pandemic:

The number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits surged by 70,000 in mid-March to a 2- 1/2-year high as the coronavirus shut down large sections of the economy. And the worst is still yet to come with the crisis triggering waves of layoffs.

Initial jobless claims climbed to a seasonally adjusted 281,000 from 211,000 in the seven days ended March 14, the government said Thursday. That’s one of the biggest one-week increases ever and puts jobless claims at the highest level since September 2017.

This is almost 200,000 *initial* claims in CA over the past 3 days.

Back to 1986, the maximum number of WEEKLY initial claims in California is 115,462. https://t.co/zY4Ib7og6V

— Aaron Sojourner (@aaronsojourner) March 19, 2020

The numbers from the first 3 days of California are even grimmer, and the online applications have been hindered by overloaded websites crashing at unemployment offices.

Given those numbers, it is not unreasonable to expect over a ¼ million applications in California, which scaled across the country, would have initial unemployment claims of around 2 million nationwide.

By comparison, the maximum number of initial unemployment claims since 1967 was 671,000 in September of 1982.

Next week promises to be a real record breaker.

By comparison, the highest level of unemployment claims during the great recession, was about