New U.S. Weekly Unemployment Claims Top 6 Million

Last week, 3,307,000 people filed a new claim for unemployment. That was a record figure. It was expected that the new claims for the week ending 3/28 would be similar. But it doubled the previous week. The number of new claims was 6,648,000. That means about 10 million people have filed unemployment claims in just the last two weeks.

On Friday, the Labor Department will release it's statistics for the month of May. It will not be pretty! It's only going to get worse though. When the statistics for April and May are published, it will get much uglier!

Here is what the Labor Department said about the new weekly figures:

In the week ending March 28, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 6,648,000, an increase of 3,341,000 from the previous week's revised level. This marks the highest level of seasonally adjusted initial claims in the history of the seasonally adjusted series. The previous week's level was revised up by 24,000 from 3,283,000 to 3,307,000. The 4-week moving average was 2,612,000, an increase of 1,607,750 from the previous week's revised average.