More than 1M Americans seek help as cuts continue
Many states have paused or reversed reopening efforts
More than a million Americans sought unemployment benefits last week, indicating that companies are cutting more jobs as the coronavirus scythes through the Sunbelt and some of the nation’s most populous states.
Layoffs in Florida, Georgia and California rose by tens of thousands, the Labor Department said Thursday in its weekly report. The number of laid-off workers seeking assistance remained stuck at 1.3 million. It was the 17th consecutive week that jobless claims surpassed 1 million.
Infections are rising in 40 states, and 22 states have either paused or reversed efforts to reopen their economies, according to Bank of America. The rising number of virus cases threatens to push what appeared to be a recovering nation into critical condition.
Applications for aid paralleled rising infections geographically. Claims in Florida doubled to 129,000, and in Georgia they rose nearly one-third to 136,000, according to the Labor Department report. In California, they increased 23,000 to nearly 288,000. Applications also went up in Arizona and South Carolina.
“Conditions in the labor market remain weak, and the risk of mounting permanent job losses is high, especially if activity continues to be disrupted by repeated virus-related shutdowns,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.
The number of people seeking jobless aid shrank in New Jersey and New York and in another hot spot, Texas, a state that hammered by job cuts this year in the energy sector.
There was a surprisingly strong report Thursday from the Census Bureau on retail sales.
While sales climbed 7.5 percent in June, private credit card data shows that those gains stalled toward the end of the month as new clusters of infections emerged.
The country has entered a phase in which businesses and consumers alike are adjusting to the perpetual risk of viral outbreaks. Retailers are already relying on skeleton crews.
“This is my biggest nightmare that we would open and re-close small businesses,” said Sandy Sigal, president and CEO of Newmark Merrill Companies, which runs 85 outdoor lifestyle centers in California, Colorado and Illinois.
Sixty of the centers are located in California, which just re-closed gyms, nail salons and other “nonessential” businesses statewide.