Fed Bank Predicts 53 Million Americans Out of Work, 32% Unemployment Rate

As we covered here on The Capitalist last week, during an interview with Bloomberg News, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard said that he is forecasting the U.S. unemployment rate will hit 30% in the coming months as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

The comments understandably raised a few eyebrows at the thought of such a staggering unemployment rate, which would be nearly triple what we experienced during the Great Recession.

Bullard tried to soften the blow in a later interview with CNBC, stating that although the unemployment number will be “unparalleled” we shouldn’t get discouraged.

“…if we play our cards right and keep everything intact, then everyone will go back to work and everything will be fine.”

Now, one of Bullard’s colleagues at the St. Louis Fed has an even more dour prediction about what America will face in the coming months.

In a research paper published last week, Miguel Faria-e-Castro, an economist at the St. Louis Fed, titled his article “Back-of-the-Envelope Estimates of Next Quarter’s Unemployment Rate” and estimated (remember, this is one man’s estimates) that nearly 53 million Americans could find themselves unemployed due to the coronavirus.

That works out to an unemployment rate of 32.1%. At the peak of the Great Depression nearly 100 years ago the unemployment rate topped out at 24.9%.

Faria-e-Castro acknowledges that it’s a massive number, and states “These are very large numbers by historical standards, but this is a rather unique shock that is unlike any other experienced by the U.S. economy in the last 100 years.”

He points to previous research that identifies 66.8 million workers who are in “occupations with high risk of layoff” that include sales, production, food preparation and services. He then looks at additional research that found 27.3 million workers in “high contact-intensive” jobs at risk such as barbers, stylists, airline attendants and food and beverage services.

Faria-e-Castro then averages those two numbers and adds in the existing number of unemployed Americans to arrive at his estimate.

While we are nowhere near reaching that unimaginable number, we are at the very beginning of a massive wave of initial jobless claims filings.

Just last week initial jobless claims hit a record of 3.3 million and another 2.65 million are expected to join them this week, according to economists surveyed by Dow Jones.

Some are even more pessimistic.

Thomas Costerg at Pictet Wealth Management has the highest estimate at 6.5 million, while Goldman Sachs estimates 5.25 million and Citigroup is at 4 million.

Moody’s Analytics predicts that initial unemployment claims from last week, which will be announced Thursday, could reach 4.5 million.

“COVID-19 has caused unemployment to surge and we look for U.S. initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits this week to total 4.5 million, compared with the 3.283 million in the week ended March 21,” Moody's Chief Economist Mark Zandi said in a statement.