‘It took 10 years for the U.S. economy to create 23 million new jobs. It took the coronavirus pandemic just a month to destroy almost as many.
The government on Thursday reported that another 5.25 million people applied for unemployment benefits in the second week of April, bringing new jobless claims in the past month to 22 million. Extrapolating from the information, Wall Street DJIA, 0.23% economists estimate the unemployment rate has leaped to record 15% or even higher.
The mind-boggling deluge of layoffs suggests the lost jobs nearly match all the employment gains since the end of the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009.
The economy didn’t begin adding new jobs until February 2010, eight months after the official end of the last recession. From that point on until February 2020, the U.S. created 23.3 million new jobs.
So: 23.3 million new jobs were created since 2010 — and 22 million jobs have vanished since mid-March.
“In four weeks, all of the job gains from the decade-long recovery following the Great Recession have been erased,” said senior economist Daniel Zhao of Glassdoor.
What’s also important to note is most of the job losses in the past month are unlikely to be permanent. Many and perhaps even most of the workers will be rehired or brought back if the economy begins to recover soon.
Now here’s where it gets a bit dicey.
Jobless claims, employment totals and the unemployment rate are all determined by separate government surveys. Thus all comparisons are inexact and not apples to apples.’
Read more: Coronavirus erases almost all the 23 million new jobs created since the Great Recession
