Thread by @bencasselman

An important reminder about today's jobless claims figures: As bad as they will be (and they will be catastrophically bad), they will NOT reflect the full scope of the problem. The true number of lost jobs is significantly higher.
Three main reasons (thread):

For one thing, a lot of people don't qualify for unemployment benefits. Self-employed, gig workers, independent contracts don't qualify. Nor do many part-timers, recent hires or very low earners. (The Senate bill would change some of that, temporarily.)

Second, a lot of people who *do* qualify don't know it. I've heard people saying things like "I got furloughed not laid off so I can't get benefits." Many of those people almost certainly do qualify, but have gotten bad info (or in some cases been misled by employers).

Third, the sudden flood of claims has overwhelmed state UI systems. There are tons of reports of jammed phone lines, overloaded servers and claimants who aren't able to file (I've spoken to several myself). Others may have heard those stories and decided not to bother trying.

All of which means we should think of today's claims number as a lower bound for the number of people who lost jobs last week. And of course today's numbers won't tell us anything about people who lost jobs *this* week.

We'll get a fuller picture eventually in the monthly jobs report, but not until May -- the data in next week's jobs report was collected two weeks ago, before the worst of the layoffs.

All that said, today's numbers will be some of the first hard data on the scope of the jobs crisis, so certainly worth paying attention to.
The report will be here at 8:30: dol.gov/ui/data.pdf
Our coverage will begin here: nytimes.com/2020/03/26/bus…