Fewer Than Half Of Working Americans Will Have A Paycheck In May

The millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in recent weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic will have devastating effects on the economy going forward as workers are left without pay. Losses in April alone could push the unemployment rate to 16%, according to James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING. If another 10 million Americans file jobless claims in May, that would push the unemployment rate to 22%, he said.

“Thankfully this is below the 24.9% peak experienced in 1933, but we have to remember that one-third of Americans aged 18-65 are not classified as employed or unemployed – they are students, early retirement, homemakers, carers or sick,” Knightly wrote in a Thursday note.

“This leads us to yet another sobering statistic – that less than half of working-age Americans will be earning a wage next month,” he said.  The estimate comes amid a huge spike in unemployment claims driven by the coronavirus pandemic. In the past five weeks, 26 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance, a staggering record-breaking number that’s quickly dwarfed job losses seen in the Great Recession. -Full Report