The U.S. labor force reached a high of 164.6 million persons in February 2020, just at the start of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Since this shut down over the virus, almost 17 million people have applied for unemployment. More than 10% of the entire workforce has been disrupted. People are losing their jobs, falling behind on mortgages and loans, and the economic devastation is far worse than this virus which has a mortality rate of at best 10% of the annual flu.
As I have made clear, my job has been to simply inform people what Socrates forecasts. I personally could not fathom how the unemployment rate would soar so fast. There is just no such precedent in history to have made that forecast. No human being could have made that prediction. Socrates looks at patterns and the common thread behind all markets and economies is how people react. This forecast was derived from pattern recognition, not fundamental analysis which was useless.
In March, the unemployment rate increased by 0.9 percentage point to 4.4 percent. This is the largest over-the-month increase in the rate since January 1975, when the increase was also 0.9 percentage point. The number of unemployed persons rose by 1.4 million to 7.1 million in March. The sharp increases in these measures reflect the effects of the coronavirus and efforts to contain it. This has continued and has now reached nearly 17 million. Based on our model, the 1st quarter elected ALL FOUR Quarterly Bullish Reversals in one shot. That has NEVER taken place on our unemployment mode even during the Great Depression. This implies we will see this trend unfold going into May. The worst is yet to come.
