BY MICHAEL SNYDER
2020 was a "personal financial disaster" for 55 percent of all Americans, approximately 12 million U.S. renters are "at least $5,850 behind in rent and utilities payments", the Aspen Institute is projecting that up to 40 million people could be facing eviction when the rent and mortgage moratoriums finally end, and more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed since the COVID pandemic began.
Nobody can point to a time since the Great Depression of the 1930s when the U.S. economy was in worse shape than it is right now.
Unfortunately, there are no indications that this nightmare is going to end. Last week, another 900,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits...
Another 900,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week, President Donald Trump's last in office, a snapshot of the significant labor market challenges facing President Joe Biden.
An additional 423,000 people in 47 states filed new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program created to help gig and self-employed workers.
Prior to 2020, the all-time record for new unemployment claims in a single week was just 695,000, and that old record was set all the way back in 1982.
We shattered that old record early in 2020, but the bigger story is what has happened since we broke it.
At this point, the number of new claims for unemployment benefits has been above 695,000 for 44 weeks in a row.
That is starting to come close to a full year.
If that does not qualify as a "collapse", then you are probably using a completely different definition of the word than I am using.
This unemployment crisis has hit low wage workers particularly hard. At this point, even Fed officials are being forced to admit that the unemployment rate for low wage workers "is above 20%".
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