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More than 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment aid since President Trump declared a national emergency four weeks ago, a staggering loss of jobs that has caused families to flood food banks as they await government help. Last week, 5.2 million people filed unemployment insurance claims in the week ending April 11, the Labor Department reported Thursday, making it among one of the bigger spikes, although smaller than the 6.6 million people who applied the week before and the record 6.9 million people who applied the week that ended on March 28. (Long, 4/16)

Thursday’s report also showed 12 million Americans received unemployment payments in the week ended April 4, a new record high. That is up from 7.4 million the prior week, which exceeded the highest level set in the 2007-2009 recession. “It might take until mid-May or longer before we see claims declining” to much lower levels, University of Michigan labor economist Daniil Manaenkov said ahead of the latest data. “It could take until we see the economy partially reopen.” (Morath and Chaney, 4/16)

The latest figure from the Labor Department, reflecting last week’s initial unemployment claims, brings the four-week total to about 22 million, roughly the net number of jobs created in a nine-and-a-half-year stretch that began after the last recession and ended with the pandemic’s arrival. It underscores how the downdraft has spread to every corner of the economy: hotels and restaurants, mass retailers, manufacturers and white-collar strongholds like law firms. “There’s nowhere to hide,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton in Chicago. “This is the deepest, fastest, most broad-based recession we’ve ever seen.” (4/16)

All businesses deemed nonessential have been closed in nearly every state as the economy has virtually shut down. Deep job losses have been inflicted across nearly every industry. Some economists say the unemployment rate could reach as high as 20% in April, which would be the highest rate since the Great Depression of the 1930s. By comparison, unemployment never topped 10% during the Great Recession. Layoffs are spreading beyond service industries like hotels, bars and restaurants, which absorbed the brunt of the initial job cuts, into white-collar professional occupations, including software programmers, construction workers and sales people. (4/16)

This latest grim picture of the labor market comes as President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on states to reopen the economy. But with the number of confirmed coronavirus cases past 600,000, states are hesitating to move too quickly. (Rainey, 4/16)

Overall, the last four weeks have marked the largest and most dramatic rise in claims on record since the Labor Department started tracking the data in 1967. Other jobs crises have played out far more slowly. In the Great Recession, for example, it took two years for 8.6 million Americans to lose their jobs. (Tappe, 4/16)

The dramatic reversal followed a decade of spectacular growth in jobs that brought the unemployment rate to near 50-year lows along with record low jobless rates for blacks and Hispanics. Now the job market is on its knees. (Zarroli and Schneider, 4/16)

New York City faces its worst fiscal crisis since the 1970s because of the coronavirus pandemic, with massive job losses and an estimated $9.7 billion decrease in the city’s tax revenue over the next two fiscal years, according to a report released Wednesday. The city’s Independent Budget Office estimated in the report that 475,000 jobs could vanish by March of next year, including 100,000 retail jobs, 86,000 jobs in hotels and restaurants, as well as a combined 26,000 jobs in the arts, entertainment and recreation industries. (Vielkind, 4/15)

About 17 million people have applied for unemployment benefits in the U.S. in recent weeks. It's an astonishing number that's nearly 10 times what the system has ever handled so quickly. But, by one estimate, that money is still not flowing to about half of those people who desperately need it. And others are only getting a trickle of what they should be receiving. Many people have been out of a job for a month now. That's a long time to be without your income in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. (Arnold, 4/15)

Ohio’s unemployment compensation fund wasn’t in great shape before the novel coronavirus. Now, state leaders estimate it will be insolvent sometime in June. That means Ohio will have a choice: borrow money from the federal government, add fees to employers or limit employees’ benefits going forward. “There are a variety of ways you can go about addressing it,” Lt. Gov. Jon Husted said Wednesday. (Borchardt and Balmert, 4/15)

As stay-at-home orders spread to once-resistant states in the South, unemployment numbers are surging and state systems to handle the jobless claims are overwhelmed, keeping desperately needed checks out of the hands of sidelined workers. In Florida, state Sen. Annette Taddeo said, “$275 a week may not be a lot, but for the people who need it, it means food on the table, medicine, paying the rent.” Hundreds of her jobless constituents in the Miami suburbs lined up for six hours last week at a Kendall megachurch for emergency food packages. (Henderson, 4/16)

When big convulsive economic events happen, the implications tend to take years to play out, and spiral in unpredictable directions. Who would have thought that a crisis that began with mortgage defaults in American suburbs in 2007 would lead to a fiscal crisis in Greece in 2010? Or that a stock market crash in New York in 1929 would contribute to the rise of fascists in Europe in the 1930s? (Irwin, 4/16)

Large chunks of the U.S. economy froze in March as the coronavirus pandemic closed malls, restaurants, factories and mines, causing Americans to cut retail spending by a record amount and the country’s industrial output to plunge at the steepest rate in more than 70 years. Retail sales, a measure of purchases at stores, gasoline stations, restaurants, bars and online, fell by a seasonally adjusted 8.7% in March from a month earlier, the biggest month-over-month decline since the records began in 1992, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Sales at clothing stores plunged by more than 50%, while spending on motor vehicles, furniture, electronics and sporting goods fell by double digits. (Torry and Nassauer, 4/15)

Landlords in at least four states have violated the eviction ban passed by Congress last month, a review of records shows, moving to throw more than a hundred people out of their homes. In an effort to help renters amid the coronavirus pandemic and skyrocketing unemployment, the March 27 CARES Act banned eviction filings for all federally backed rental units nationwide, more than a quarter of the total. (Ernsthausen, Simani and Elliott, 4/16)