As to Initial Unemployment Claims, we had two straight weeks of roughly 1.5 million claims at a point in the crisis where economies were purportedly "reopening" and claims should have subsided. I believe that some of this was due to renewed layoffs of previously rehired workers.

Keep in mind that 1.5 million (or even the 1.3 million expected this morning) unemployment insurance claims is a number that itself has never been seen before this crisis, even though it is down from the 6+ million level we saw a few weeks ago. Suggests other forces at work:

A continued high level of Initial Unemployment Insurance Claims will indicate that some businesses with fewer than 500 headcount that "re-payrolled" non-working employees, to obtain Payroll Protection Program loan forgiveness, do not have the strength to carry them post-PPP funds

Initial Unemployment Insurance Claims for the week ended June 27th were 1,427,000 million

Continuing Unemployment Insurance Claims basically did not budge (rose 59K) and are stuck at 19.29 million. The higher than expected initial claims number is not, I repeat NOT, correlated with the states seeing major new outbreaks of #COVID19. No, this is structural, folks.

I am going to head back to my thread on the June Employment Situation Report now, but suffice it to say that this higher-than-expected level of initial claims, and the states in which they occurred does not bode well for July in a post-PPP expenditures world.