This time, we are dealing with a peculiar situation. In particular, now that we are facing truly bad figures, the market reaches to them not the way we expected. When it comes to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, there's almost no positive progress. That's is why international investors are now trying to find some good news in the economic field. Can we actually see some improvements?
Today, we can say that the U.S. jobless claims figures turned out to be really really bad. In particular, the initial jobless claims increased all the way up to 6,6 million people, which is 2% of the U.S. population. With that being said, now you can see how bad the situation in the United States really is.
Apparently, the jobless claims themselves cannot directly testify to any unemployment increase or unemployment benefit payments. Many people got back to work only to gain free healthcare insurance. The jobless claims keep growing in number, though slower than expect - 3 million against 5 million expected. Anyway, the United States seems to be doomed to face considerable unemployment growth.
Wall Street Reacts
The Wall Street reacted to the mentioned figures in a failry reserved way. We haven't seen any major crash. Some minor declines by 20-30 points. Later on, when the ISM figures from New York (the region most affected by the coronavirus pandemic) came in disastrous as well, actually the worst ever, we saw a rebound. The next day, the Wall Street opened higher and has been rally ever since.
It's interesting to note that some moderate growth was seen even during the European session. Which is even more surprising, the biggest gains were seen in Italy, where the situation is still far away from being under control. Even though we can see the pandemic slowing down a bit, which is good news.
