US Jobless Figures Spike at 30 Million, Leaps 4 Million in a Week

By Staff, Agencies

The United States' long-term outlook took another potentially grim step after it was announced that 3.8 million Americans filed for unemployment benefit in the last week.

Those additional job seekers brought six-week total of jobless claims to 30.3 million, the country’s worst employment crisis since the onset of 1929's Great Depression.

This latest figure actually represents a significant decline from the last week of March, which saw 6.8 million people claim unemployment benefit - by an order of magnitude the greatest single-week job loss in US history. In fact, since that high, the number of people claiming unemployment benefit has declined on a week-on-week basis.

However, prior to March 21, no single week since 1967 had seen even 1 million initial claims.

Although economists had predicted that 3.5 million Americans would apply for unemployment benefit during the week, this current increase is still significantly less than the 4.4 million who became unemployed the week previously.

It is estimated that one in six Americans - or approximately 19 percent - have filed for unemployment claims.

“With more employers cutting payrolls to save money, economists have forecast that the unemployment rate for April could go as high as 20 percent. That would be the highest rate since it reached 25 percent during the Great Depression,” according to the Associated Press.