The U.S. unemployment rate hit 14.7% in April, the highest rate since the Great Depression, as 20.5 million jobs vanished in the worst monthly loss on record. What can be made of the data as some state’s begin reopening their economies and Michigan’s manufacturers come back online?
“The change from one month to the next month is mindboggling. The number of people who lost jobs between the beginning of March and April.”
A national unemployment rate of 14.7% is historic, and Paul Isely, Associate Dean in the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University says next month’s U.S reading will be even worse.
“The unemployment numbers are actually gathered the week of April 12th and since that time there’s been close to 10 million more people apply for unemployment benefits nationwide. That’s starting to point towards a number that will be north of 20% is a possibility now for May.”
While we won’t get the Michigan unemployment numbers for a few more weeks, Isely says the state is behaving differently.
“What we can see from the jobless claims numbers that it really plateaued as we were getting into the last two weeks toward the end of April. And so, as a result we’re actually probably have already peaked in Michigan and we’ll start to see that start to drop.”
As the state reopens its economy Isely says the unemployment rate will drop into high single digits midsummer.
I’m Patrick Center.