ECONOMIC DESPAIR: US Unemployment Claims Surpass the 1 Million Mark for Second Straight Week
Shane Trejo
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U.S. unemployment claims have passed the 1 million threshold for the second straight week, as the economic situation remains dire because of the seemingly never-ending COVID-19 lockdown.
Although job numbers have rebounded in certain respects, the economy continues to shed jobs in sectors devastated by the shutdown. American Airlines announced that they will be cutting 19,000 jobs by October, Delta announced that they will likely be axing 1,900 pilots, and United Airlines is expected to cut up to 36,000 employees this year.
The experts are claiming that COVID-19 fear has gripped the American psyche, and the Democrat Party and mass media are keeping the economy in the dumps due to the mass hysteria that they will just not let die.
“Though we are seeing a meaningful decline in new Covid-19 cases, the trends in economic indicators have not changed significantly. There continue to be signs that the recovery is slowing at best and at worst is reversing somewhat,” Bank of America Global Research wrote in a note to investors.
“We likely need to see daily Covid-19 cases decline much more significantly in order for gains in economic activity to accelerate meaningfully,” the note read.
Big League Politics has reported on the many ways that COVID-19 has spoiled President Donald Trump’s economic recovery, perhaps by design:
The coronavirus pandemic and mass hysteria that has followed it will have a long-lasting negative impact on the food service industry, according to a recent study.
A survey from the National Restaurant Association (NRA) of over 4,000 restaurant owners has indicated that 11 percent of restaurant owners believe they will have to close up shop permanently with three percent saying they have already closed their doors for good. These calculations extrapolated across the entire industry mean that over 110,000 restaurants will be forced to close forever within a month.
In the first 22 days of March, restaurants lost an estimated $25 billion in sales and over three million jobs because of coronavirus-related economic peril. The consumption-based economy has evaporated immediately, and the ramifications could be dire.
Roger Lipton, a restaurant industry investor and commentator, is calling this the “restaurant apocalypse” and sees the business heading into uncharted territory where the damages could be unlike anything that has happened in the industry before.
“Any pundit who thinks that they’re going to use a recent history — and by recent history, I mean the last 100 years, including the Depression — as a template for what is going to go on here? They’re kidding themselves,” Lipton said to Business Insider on Monday.
Cowen analyst Andrew Charles is predicting that the pain is just getting started for the restaurant industry. Charles is forecasting “a steady, double-digit decline in same-store sales that began on March 16th and persists through the end of July.” Jordan Thaeler, founder of the foot traffic tracking company WhatsBusy, told Cowen that fine dining sales have dropped over 90 percent, casual dining has dropped 75 percent, and fast food has dropped by approximately 50 percent due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Lipton believes that the turmoil in the restaurant industry will likely last for years. He thinks that many franchises, many of which are already flush with debt, will ultimately go under after losing steady revenue streams from franchisees. Small mom-and-pop restaurants with no major cash reserves will also be squeezed tremendously during this crisis.
It will not be fully understood for years exactly how much damage has been done to society because of the COVID-19 scamdemic.
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