Unemployment Insurance Claims Top 6 Million
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Economy, JobsFirst, thanks to Calculated Risk, here’s what this look like when put into historical context…
Whenever I see a graph like that it makes me cringe, but what goes up must come down eventually.
Now, the details…
The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending April 4 was 6,022,000, an increase of 172,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 5,850,000. The 4-week moving average was 5,796,000, an increase of 146,000 from the preceding week’s revised average of 5,650,000.
Which states are getting hit hardest?
The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending March 28 were in Michigan (8.0 percent), Oregon (7.9), Rhode Island (7.1), Idaho (7.0), Wisconsin (7.0), Pennsylvania (6.7), Nevada (6.2), Alaska (6.0), Montana (6.0), and Vermont (5.9).The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending April 4 were in Michigan (+5,408), Missouri (+4,986), Texas (+3,734), New Jersey (+2,368), and Pennsylvania (+2,194) [...]
No doubt that list keeps going and going…
Still, some states are seeing relief…
[...] the largest decreases were in California (-4,708), Ohio (-2,716), Alabama (-2,421), Florida (-1,539), and Wisconsin (-1,078).
More as it develops…
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April 16th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Because these are somewhat misleading raw numbers, let’s compare the numbers from each peak shown to the US population at the time. As we all know there were fewer total numbers of people in America during the previous peaks, so we need to use percents if we want to know what portion of total people were making claims in each recessionary period. I’ll use the higher “continued claimant:” numbers, estimating from the graph, and I’ll use pop numbers from a quick googling:
So, what percent of total people were making claims during each period?
This means that, at least at this point, unemployment clams are in the same ballpark as the ‘75 and ‘83 recessions, which I can assure you were plenty bad.
This also means that at this point the recession is not singularly historically “great depression, wear a barrel, brutha-can-u-spare-a-dime” bad.
This contextualization has been brought to you by the League of Anti-Douche Meanies.