Coronavirus is destroying the United States job market. Unemployment insurance claims in that country have soared from 281,000 two weeks ago to 3,283,000 in which it ended on Saturday 21.

Not only is it the highest figure in history, but it is also double the approximately 1.64 million waiting for the market. It is also nearly five times the previous record of 695,000 jobless claims reached in October 1982. Former director of the Congressional Budget Office, Keith Hall , already compared the data to "the Great Depression, but in an instant" in statements to the The Wall Street Journal . A few minutes before the release of the statistics, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell tried to bring calm to the market by claiming that the central bank "is far from running out of ammunition."

Thus, the coronavirus - or, as US President Donald Trump and many of his advisers call it, "the Chinese virus" or "the Wuhan virus" - has ended the longest period of US job creation. . It has been 10 years and a month of uninterrupted expansion of the labor market with the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in which 22 million jobs have been created, although wage growth was nil until two years ago it began to rebound. In this period the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November 2009 to 3.5% in February.

The news comes when the House of Representatives is preparing to vote on the stimulus plan for the economy for 2.2 trillion dollars (2 trillion euros) approved by the Senate yesterday at 11 p.m. (4 a.m. today) in Spain). The plan includes a temporary increase in the unemployment benefit of 600 dollars (547 euros) per month. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had to go to great lengths to convince a group of Republican senators led by Lindsey Graham who opposed the stimulus package precisely because of the rise in unemployment insurance that they said was going to discourage the unemployed to look for a job. "What the citizens want is to keep their jobs," said Mnuchin.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • U.S
  • Unemployment
  • Coronavirus

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