That comes to about 27 million initial claims over the past 5 weeks, and an unemployment rate something north of 15%.
We are going to be seeing an unemployment rate in excess of 25% by the end of June:
An additional 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment last week adding to a total of over 26 million since the coronavirus pandemic shut down swaths of the US and brought its economy to a standstill.
The latest Department of Labor figures show the pace of layoffs appears to have slowed slightly but a backlog of claims mean millions more are likely to file in the coming weeks. States across the country are encountering problems with the sheer number of people applying for unemployment benefits.
This is not going to be pretty.