White House advisers and members of the Trump administration are warning that the United States should expect to see an unemployment rate above 20% next month.
On Friday, newly released unemployment data revealed that the U.S. economy shed 20.5 million jobs in April for an unemployment rate of 14.7%. During an interview with Face the Nation on Sunday, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said the unemployment rate could climb above 20% in the coming months.
“I’m looking for rates north of 20, sadly,” Hassett said. “Part of this is not really a science as much as just math, arithmetic, because we get the initial claims for unemployment insurance each week and the survey week was the 12th, and so, between now and the next 12th, we’ll watch the claims come in and pretty much be able to guess what the unemployment rate will be and how many jobs will be created.”
NEWS: @WhiteHouse Economic Adviser projects #unemployment rate could climb to “north” of 20% by next month due to #COVID19
See more of Hassett’s interview on @facethenation at 10:30 EST pic.twitter.com/6Qv4DeedEn
— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 10, 2020
Hassett, who previously predicted that the unemployment rate could reach “almost 20%,” noted that as many as 3 million unemployment claims per week have been filed. While there was plenty of bad news about the economy, he told State of the Union on Sunday that the country can expect significant growth in the final two quarters of the year, starting in July.
“I would guess the middle of the summer we are going to go into the transition phase and then I expect that by the second half of the year, the [Congressional Budget Office] forecast is what we hope will be right, which will be that you have very strong growth in the third and fourth quarters.”
He later added, “If you go from a stopped economy to an economy that’s turning back on, then it kind of necessarily needs to be projecting up, right.”
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offered a similar outlook, saying unemployment rates in the coming months “could be” close to 25%. The U.S. unemployment rate was near 25% at the height of the Great Depression. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow also warned that unemployment “numbers for May are going to be also very difficult numbers” during a Sunday interview with ABC’s This Week.
