The pace at which Americans are losing their jobs is absolutely breathtaking.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the largest number of new claims for unemployment benefits ever recorded in a single week prior to this year was 695,000 during the week that ended October 2nd, 1982.

So that means that what we are now witnessing is completely unprecedented, as The US Department of Labor reports a stunning increase of 3.283 million people sought initial jobless claims last week amid the virus lockdowns (almost double the expectation of a 1.7million increase).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that nearly every single state cited Covid-19 in its reporting.

Service industries were hit hard, but the BLS says other industries were cited: health care and social assistance, arts, entertainment and recreation, transportation and warehousing, and manufacturing.

Only three states had estimated claims.

We know that several states' unemployment websites crashed, were running slow, or malfunctioned in recent weeks as an unprecedented number of applicants tried to file at the same time.

The states with the biggest jump in advance claims from the prior week were Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey.

As Saxo Bank's Christopher Dembik also warns, keep in mind that an undefined number of claims went unreported as states' unemployment insurance program offices were overwhelmed by the massive number of applications both by phone and online. Some states even informed that their phone lines was saturated and their website crashed due to high demand. It means that next week's data might be very ugly as well, or even worse.