KPMG, one of the nation’s top four accounting firms, chief economist Constance Hunter expressed grave concerns about the coronavirus AKA SARS CoV-2 or Covid-19 creating Depression-era job losses. Losing 700,000 non-farm payroll jobs, Hunter says the waves of sudden unemployment are worst since the Great Depression, following the 1929 Stock Market Crash. “I mean it is just so heartbreaking, this data,” Hunter said. “We have more social safety nets in place than the during the Great Depression but this is way worse than anything we saw during the Great Depression,” referring to sudden job losses. What accompanied the 1929 stock market crash was a “run on the bank,” where depositors demanded cash and banks quickly ran out. While that’s not going to happen in today’s world, the sheer volume of unemployed has caused 9 million workers to file for unemployment benefits.
Hunter expects to see jobs losses accelerate in April when post March 12 “shelter in place” orders kick in. This week numbers don’t include job losses after March 12, anticipating another 8 million jobs lost, maybe as much as 12 million disappear. Hunter could see 25 million jobs lost in the second quarter, in the biggest loss of employment in U.S. history. Whether Wall Street’s got the message yet, the rude awakening is on its way, expecting a sell-off to take markets below March lows, perhaps down another 20% or more. Today’s Dow Jones Industrial Average of 21,052.53 is down 29% of its Feb. 12 record high of 29,551. Funds have been playing around value shopping, finding bargains when markets drop. Allianz SE economist Mohamed El-Erian doesn’t think Wall Street’s strategy of buying on dips strategy will work this time around, saying, “it’s hard to catch a falling knife.”
When jobless claims hit 6.648 million for the week ending March 28, it smashed the record of 695,000. Such a precipitous drop sent stocks swooning, eclipsing value buyers hoping to dollar-cost-average in portfolios. Hunter said even in the Great Depression, there was never such a drop-off, only a gradual decline over several years. “We didn’t t have a sudden drop off the cliff like this,” Hunter said. Hunter worries that many furloughed workers would not return to their jobs once companies have the liquidity and demand to bring them back. “Firms that have had to fire workers are probably going to go back to many of their same workers and rehire them—but of course there will be some friction and some sorting, as many people don’t go back to the same employers,” Hunter said. Such discontinuity at small-and-large businesses is going to make getting back to normal very difficult.
Restarting businesses won’t be easy when employers can’t get the workplace reestablished to hit the ground running. No one really knows whether the same pent-up demand for goods and services will be there automatically. As companies shutter and shed jobs, it’s going to be difficult to reverse the trend, getting businesses back on track. Estimating that the real unemployment rate today could be 13%, Univ. of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers commented that the St. Louis Fed forecasted that unemployment could jump to a whopping 32%, well above the 24.9% recorded in 1933 in the pit of the Great Depression. U.S. manufacturing jobs didn’t get into gear until President Franklin D. Roosevelt ramped up the war effort in 1939, not long after Hitler invaded Poland Sept. 1, 1939. Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff agreed that the coronavirus crisis looks to eclipse the 2008 Financial Crisis.
Wall Street investors, from the nation’s biggest funds to the little guy with an IRA or pension fund could watch their life savings go up in smoke. Expectations of a V-shaped snap-back recovery have been dashed, expecting years to get the economy back to where it was before the SARS CoV-2 global pandemic. President Donald Trump can only hope that voters don’t blame him for the market crash that could watch unemployment skyrocket to over 30%. If there’s any hope at all, it comes from the strong bipartisan response passing a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill to salvage what looks like an atom bomb to the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell is ready to keep liquidity in the banking sector, unlike the Great Depression. “This is already shaping up as the deepest dive on record for the global economy for over 100 years,” Rogoff said, not mincing words.
