Initial claims at 857,148 (NSA), largely unchanged. Continuing claims also fairly steady at 13,197,059. There's a risk we are becoming numb to numbers this high and steady, but we can't lose sight of how bad this is. While the economy is recovering, this is still bad news

Last year at this time there were 160,342 initial claims. So we are up by around 700,000. That's such a massive amount of job loss, and it doesn't even include PUA.

There are real contradictions in the data all around. CPS says the unemployment level is 13.6 million, claims says 29.6 million. Truth is likely somewhere in between. CPS is undercounting for sure, claims likely double counting