When I first saw a different version of the chart below posted by Torsten Slok in his “The Daily Spark” email newsletter, I immediately had to confirm the data myself by heading over to the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s FRED system and try to recreate a full version using their data sources directly.
Just looking at the chart itself is innocuous and innocent as it reveals nothing more than private payroll status on a non-seasonally adjusted (estimated) basis for private corporations in the United States based on the number of employees.
If just companies of less than 249 employees have to lay off 10% of their employees due to supply chain issues or an economic slowdown induced by the trade war, that’s 9.61 million people.
At 20%, it’s obviously double, 19.183 million people.
Either amount doesn’t include larger corporations having to lay off workers due to the trade war so America’s overall real unemployment rate (U-6) could easily rocket north of 17% if not 25% in very short order.
Such economic shocks are not calculated into our credit and deficit based system and would be catastrophic for the economy with the potential or a major recession or depression lasting a minimum of one year, probably two depending on the resolution.
Hope you had a great Easter with your families and nobody found the evil egg that I stumbled upon.
