The Covid-19 pandemic, which killed an additional 1,783 people in 24 hours and nearly 17,000 people in total in the United States, counting on Thursday April 9, from Johns Hopkins University, is wreaking havoc on the economy. The unemployed number in the millions and companies are forced to lower the curtain en masse because of containment measures.

Some 6.6 million new job seekers registered unemployed from March 29 to April 4, after a record 6.8 million new applications the previous week. In just three weeks, the job market, which had been booming for 50 years, collapsed to the point of forcing 16.7 million people to fill out an allowance application. Hundreds in Florida had been queuing up for hours in the past few days to fill out the paperwork after the computer system crashed.

Coronavirus in the United States: "The African-American community is the hardest hit"

President Donald Trump, who had made the country's economic health an electoral argument, is in the middle of a campaign to try to win a second term in November. He did not hide his desire to restart the activity as quickly as possible, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday that May was a possible deadline.

Fed injects $ 2.3 trillion

Earlier Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci - the epidemiologist in charge at the federal level - brought a ray of hope by estimating that the Americans could perhaps take a summer vacation, but under conditions, whereas the country hopes reach the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the coming days. The disease affected more than 460,000 people in the United States on Thursday evening.

The Trump administration, Congress and the Central Bank have been mobilizing for several weeks now to try to stop the bleeding. On Thursday, the Central Bank started charging again by announcing loans worth $ 2.3 trillion to "support the economy". The Fed, through the banks, will offer four-year loans to businesses with up to 10,000 employees, and will buy bonds issued by the most populous states, counties and cities directly.

These measures are meant to "ensure that the recovery will be as vigorous as possible when it comes," said Jerome Powell. The unemployment rate is rising "at an alarming speed" although "temporary", he noted.

The negative effects of this crisis could, however, be less lasting than those which followed that of 2008, had estimated members of the monetary committee of the Fed at their last meeting, at the end of which they had lowered the interest rates close to zero.

With AFP and Reuters

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