This number is going to be heavily revised next Thursday Mish, much higher and will keep going up. In fact the 3.28 million people filing have overwhelmed the systems at state level, UI will be granted to many retroactively because of that.
The long-term is harder to guess at, if this goes on for another month till the end of April I am thinking some businesses on the margin just will not come back from it. If we are still basically where we are or worse by one month from now we will see more stimulus, more debt.
As to the deflation/inflation (HYPER???? Anyone?) debate, and there is one in spite of your certainty Mish, it is too early to tell. But, I am thinking that a lot of debt will go bad and just get wiped off the books.
I was watching a Youtube tyhe other day because Peter Schiff was being interviewed, we all know how is widely dismissed as being right the same way a broken clock is, but I thought I would watch anyway, and he made the point that money only has value as it relates to what it can buy in the way of goods and services. If production of those goods and services goes down while money supply rises (and god knows between the Fed and unlimited QE as well as Fed bailouts, and the federal government and trillions more in bailouts money supply is rising at a pace unimaginable even a few months ago) the result can only be inflation. It cannot be deflation. Yes, the price of some things will fall temporarily as demand falls because of the present emergency, but when that is past us what will be left is far lower production and far more money in the economy, prices will rise just as unimaginably as the current pumping and then some because once you start hyperinflation the only cure is more hyperinflation.
Weimar did manage to stop hyperinflation of it's papiermarks but only by deleting that currency and going to the rentenmark in which every denomination was backed by German assets including everything in Germany, agricultural land, industry, factories, everything. And even then the economy crashed, though that crash did make it possible to start to rebuild, but the damage was done and the cure was Adolf Hitler. He put people back to work but not in a constructive way, he did it by getting them prepared for WWII, even the autobahns were meant to facilitate troop and materiel movement.
"After the Occupation of the Ruhr in early 1923 by French and Belgian troops, referred to as the Ruhrkampf, the German government of Wilhelm Cuno reacted by announcing a policy of passive resistance. This caused the regional economy of the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany, almost to stop. The occupation authorities reacted with arrests and deportations to strikes and sabotage. Those displaced and left without income by the Ruhrkampf and their families fell back on public income support. Tax revenues plunged as economic activity slowed. The government covered its need for funds mainly by printing money. As a result, inflation spiked and the Papiermark went into freefall on the currency market. Foreign currency reserves at the Reichsbank dwindled.[2]" Wiki
Sound familiar? Economy has an overnight heart attack with millions unemployed, fall back for support on public treasury printing presses, tax revenues plunge, production goes out the window, and inflation results.
We actually went through something similar after Nixon closed the gold window, not as severe, but I well remember the years of inflation, especially during the Ford and Carter administrations and the total lack of effective response till Volker raised the prime lending rate to over 19% multiple times. The oil embargo did to our economy what happened to the German economy in the occupation of the Ruhr. Not to that extreme a degree, but the slowdown was severe. I remember the 12% plus inflation because I was already grossly underpaid in the new all volunteer military and while inflation was double digits year in and year out we got 1-2% raises, that was before the COLA laws were passed. In a few short years we were making about half as much in spending power as we had in 1976. And it was Volker raising interest rates to 19% that gave us the recession of 81/82 that was the previous record for unemployment claims. He stompped hard on the economy and that did put the inflation fire out so it did not morp any further into hyperinflation.
We can't (or should I say will not) do that now because sudden interest rates over say 15-19% would nuke the debt markets in a way it did not then, if there was a mountain of debt then there is an etire galaxy of debt now. It would probably result in at least a billion deaths worldwide as economies around the world simply stop. We would see canibalism. That is how bad it will get. Then again something like that does seem inevitable since just continuing to add zeros to the books will eventually do that as well. We can't just keep inventing new names for larger numbers, like a petatrillion dollar minimum wage. The time has to come when economics and finance are just irrelevent. Survival becomes the only thing for enough people to bring it asll down.
By the way, did you see that in spite of the Fed support for all markets S&P cut Ford Motors to junk today? I expect that Ford is not the only one though, GE, GM, and other larger players in the commercial paper market are also going to get slashed. Borg Warner I think I would get some put options on. But that is just me and NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE!
