Initial Jobless Claims

There were 1.314 Million individuals who filed for unemployment benefits for the first-time last week. This was slightly better than expectations of 1.4M. Continuing claims improved pretty significantly from 18.76M to 18.06M, which is the first meaningful improvement we have seen since in quite some time - Before the revision to last week there were over 1M individuals who came off the unemployment ranks. We estimate the real time unemployment figure to be around 14%, which would be about 3% higher or 17% without the Payroll Protection Plan.