Nordea forventer, at den amerikanske ledighed vil stige voldsomt og kan nå 12,7 pct. eller 14,5 millioner for hele andet kvartal. Nye ledighedstal kommer i morgen. De seneste tal viste 3,3 millioner ledige for marts.
Uddrag fra Nordea:
US Macro: The King abdicates
We provide here an overview of what to expect from upcoming US labour market key figures. Our forecast suggests that the unemployment rate will reach post-WW2 highs.
Last week, the increase of 3.3 million initial jobless claims made the corresponding numbers from the Great Recession look small, thereby offering a glimpse of just how deep the US recession might turn out to be. Although recent monetary and fiscal packages will alleviate some of the negative consequences (the fiscal package “Phase Three” will, for instance, more or less fully compensate low income workers), it will not be enough to prevent a historical drop in personal expenditures and overall domestic demand.
Chart 1. The most crazy chart the authors of this paper have ever seen
Let’s start with what we do know. Due to measurement technicalities one should not expect tomorrow’s nonfarm payroll number for March to be at the same scale as the initial jobless claims number last week (Bloomberg’s survey though still shows that some economists expect payrolls to decline by 4M).
In terms of today’s initial claims number, consensus is at 3.5 million which is even higher than last week.
Looking further ahead, we expect initial claims to drop materially, although remain at historically high levels. Ie we still project millions instead of the usual thousands. A drop by 25-50% in each of the coming few weeks could be on the cards (in line with some state reports), leaving the total number of claims until the April Establishment Survey around 7.5-11 million with much depending on today’s number. More strict lockdown rules leaves upside risks (see discussion here in Corona Daily), while fiscal measures such as the $367 billion loan to small business should keep some employees on the payrolls.
This results in nonfarm payroll prints of -78k in March, -7.6 million in April and roughly 14.5 million for the entire Q2. We see the risk as clearly tilted towards higher numbers – especially for April.
Chart 2. Nonfarm payrolls model. We hope you can forgive us for the chart not showing the model’s turns pre-corona – the upcoming payrolls are simply too unproportionally large
Translating this into the unemployment rate, we will see an increase to 8.2% in April and a peak in Q2 at 12.7%. To put this into perspective, the unemployment rate has never risen above 11% post-WW2.
