Original tweets (from a different Twitter account, belonging to Len Kiefer, an economist Freddie Mac):

https://twitter.com/lenkiefer/status/1245702858449784832

And the full blog post with more details:

http://lenkiefer.com/2020/04/03/us-labor-market-update-april...

Curve flattened.. Vertically.

I’d be more interested in seeing the actual unemployment rate presented like this, not the weekly claim numbers.

The civilians labor force is about 165 million people, so we’ve added about ~5% to the unemployment rate in the last two weeks (say 9m increase in claims).

Unemployment peaked at around 25% in the 1930s depression. Rough calcs suggest that could be surpassed: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/march/back-en...

March numbers for overall unemployment rate have been published, but they’re wildly inaccurate because their reference date is mid-month, before most layoffs started.

So we don’t really know yet with precision, but it’s getting close to Great Recession levels.

No, it’s Great Depression levels. You can tell from suppliers.

I just got some equipment quoted with a 2 week delivery guarantee. A month ago there was a 10 week backorder due to Chinese supply chain issues.

The overall market is imploding. Once you see prices drop, that’s it.

Jesus. That kind of off-the-chart result is why log graphs were invented. Your link really hammers the disaster home.