Economists expect yet another week where millions of Americans filed for unemployment benefits

The estimate is below the 5.2 million Americans that filed for claims in the previous week, signaling a downward trend in unemployment claims.
Still, another week of millions of Americans filing for benefits shows the damage that the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns to curb the spread of the disease has had on the US economy.
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Economists are anticipating that a Thursday report from the Labor Department will once again show that millions of Americans filed for unemployment claims in the week ending April 18, as coronavirus layoffs persist.

The median consensus estimate for weekly unemployment insurance claims is 4.5 million, according to Bloomberg data. The estimate is again below the 5.2 million Americans who filed for unemployment benefits in the previous week, marking the third report in a row to show a decline in claims.

initial claims projections 4 18 20 Business Insider/Andy Kiersz

Even if there is a declining trend in the reports, 4.5 million filing for unemployment in one week is a staggering number that shows just how widespread the economic fallout is from the coronavirus-induced lockdown in the US.

"It's been humbling to try to predict unemployment claims," Jason Thomas, chief economist at AssetMark, told Business Insider. Still, there is "probably no single metric you can look at" to better get a broad sense of how the economy is doing than unemployment, he said.

The consensus estimate for this week's report would bring total claims filed during the coronavirus pandemic, which started in mid-March, to about 26 billion. That means that in just five weeks, the US will have erased millions more jobs than were created from the trough of unemployment in the Great Recession through the longest-ever economic recovery.

Going forward, economists expect that the April unemployment rate will skyrocket when data is released in May. The jump in claims through April 11 would raise the unemployment rate to 15.7%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

But that figure accounts for everything else staying the same, which is not the case, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at EPI, in a statement . One reason for this is that not all workers who have filed for unemployment insurance benefits will be counted as unemployed for example, furloughed workers or any others not actively seeking employment will be left out of the count.

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