by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
In all of U.S. history, we have never seen a spike in unemployment like we are witnessing right now. Last Thursday it was announced that more than 3.2 million Americans had filed new claims for unemployment benefits during the previous week, and many believe that the number that will be announced this Thursday will be even larger. By the way, the previous all-time record for a single week was just 695,000. So what is happening right now is absolutely nuts. 49 percent of U.S. companies anticipate conducting layoffs within the next 3 months, and the St. Louis Fed is projecting that the unemployment rate in this country will soon rise to 32 percent. Before the coronavirus pandemic started shutting virtually everything down, approximately 158 million Americans were employed, and so we could soon have tens of millions of unemployed workers on our hands if the St. Louis Fed’s projection is accurate.