The first real gauge of how hard the coronavirus scare has hit the economy will come soon from weekly jobless claims data.
Heading into the crisis, the jobs market had been strong, with more than 200,000 monthly payroll gains and a low level of new entrants to the unemployment rolls.A job-seeker hands his resume to Candice Perkins, a representative of Workforce1 during a 'Work Search' event aimed at older unemployed people in New York City.
Virtually all of the economic data releases out now cover periods before the COVID-19 spread began to zero in on the U.S. Some of those reports have hinted at a slowdown heading into the worst of the virus period, but the extent of the damage has been hard to gauge. That will change over the next week or so when the Labor Department releases the tallies for weekly jobless claims,
Previous weeks have shown a labor market that was strong heading into the crisis — the week ending March 7 showed new filings of just 211,000, which reflected a 4,000 drop from the previous week. The four-week moving average edged up to 1.725 million, but that still remained within the confines of a well-functioning labor market.