4 Million Jobs Lost LastWeek

The US Census Pulse Surveys give us good data to look at employment between employment reports. This week, the survey suggests we lost **4** million jobs.

This is due to the resurgence of COVID. Here’s a graph of hospitalizations (inverted) compared to employment based on the Census Pulse Surveys.

The survey peaked at almost 135 million employed persons as of Jun 16th. Since then – through July 14th – employment is down to almost 128 million jobs.

You can see the strong correlation with hospitalizations. Given hospitalizations hit a record high yesterday, I expect employment to continue to fall in the next survey.

Given the extra employment ends this week as well as the end of other support, the economy could suffer greatly in the next few weeks.

2.6mm Jobs Lost this Month

The U.S. Census has been doing flash surveys every week since April on Employment. The data so far this month suggests the economy has lost 2.6mm jobs.

The data is delayed about 8 days but, as noted a week or so ago, this is to be expected because restaurant data had been dropping. Here’s the updated graph between restaurant traffic and Employment.

OpenTable Traffic vs. U.S. Census Estimated Employment

The good news is that next week the restaurant data suggests either no or a smaller drop in jobs.

With that said, 2.5mm jobs is huge and will increase unemployment by almost 2% next month.