More than 600k Americans filed for unemployment last week.

That’s good. The numbers are coming down. It’s a pandemic low...

But it’s also still really bad. If you take the before times into consideration...

The same week in 2019 204k Americans filed.

In other words, people are still seeking help because they’ve lost work at almost 3x the normal pre-pandemic rate.

The economy is recovering. But wow. It’s still really bad out there. Especially when you scratch the surface a bit as my colleague @andretartar has been doing. https://twitter.com/andretartar/status/1389623983549698048

In March the percentage of Americans working was at a level not seen since the 1980s. The April jobs numbers may take it up a notch to a level akin to the worst of the 2008/09 Great Recession...

That’s a reminder ahead of tomorrow’s big April non-farm payrolls release that the US isn’t really creating jobs as much as recovering jobs right now...