Economy: The coronavirus pandemic has swiftly transcended to one of the worst economic downturns in U.S history. And, the worst is yet to come, predicted by some world-renowned economists. The tracking indicators forecasting and unprecedented situation in the U.S economy, and it’s only getting difficult.
Martha Gimbel, an economist at Schmidt Futures, said,
“My outlook right now is that I don’t even have an outlook. This is so bad and so unprecedented that any attempt to forecast what’s going to happen here is just a fool’s game.”
Retail sales, consumer sentiment, industrial production, and home sales have all deteriorated as most of the U.S remains under lockdown as just much as the rest of the world to curb the spread of COVID-19. That being said, the number of economic indicators that have hit records in the last month is staggering, the rate of unemployment skyrocket, and more than 49% of the working-class don’t have savings.
The economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic this weekly has only resulted in 26 million unemployed rate sky jump in America in just over a month. The percentage has left the world baffled by U.S economic condition and it will take time to recover from this yet to come worst recession in history.
The rapid loss of jobs has been so serve that in just four weeks, the unemployment crisis cause of COVID-19 battle has roughly equaled all of the jobs created in the period since the Great Recession — the longest-ever economic downfall on record after World War 2. Since March, each weekly unemployment insurance report released reflected figures that are far above the worst week of the Great Depression during the 1930s; the Americans filed approx. 665,000 claims in a month.
Michael Gapen, the chief economist at Barclays, said,
“We have to acknowledge that our models really aren’t built for this, most of our models are linear, so they’re good for small deviations within the normal space,”
he explained, and further continued to add,
“I’m not sure you have a model that tells you anything about the state of the world that you’re in.”
Millions of claims being filed per week have been rapidly increasing, during March 14th, the unemployment insurance claims jumped to 281,000 then a two-year high. The very next week, claims jumped to 3.3 million, and another week later, the records hit an all-time of 6.9 million.
In early April, Goldman Sachs estimated that America’s GDP would contract 34% in the second quarter. That would roughly translate to 19.8 million jobs lost by July, and an unemployment rate skyrocket to about 14%, according to the EPI.
Martha Gimbel,
“Everyone wants an answer, they all want to know exactly how bad it is and how bad it’s going to get. And that’s just almost impossible to tell right now.”
