Quote from Savings Beagle on April 23, 2020, 7:30 pm

With today's release that 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits this past week, our total now stands at approximately 26 million unemployed U.S. workers.

The only positive to glean is that the numbers filing for unemployment have decreased when looked at on a per week basis.  Hopefully, that's a result of layoffs abating and not state unemployment offices just not getting the filings completed in a timely manner.

These totals are bad enough, we really don't want to see many more in the coming weeks.

Last week I chided Congress to stop the political gameplay and provide additional monies for the Paycheck Protection Program which ran out of money within a week or so of going live.

Finally, as I sit to write this, a week later, Congress passed a measure with additional PPP funding...among other things.

My guess is those additional PPP funds...to the tune of $321 billion...will go fairly quickly, too.  There are a lot of small and medium-sized businesses struggling to not permanently close their doors.  And these dollars will help them, for a short period of time, keep operating and paying their employees.

It seems pretty obvious at this point that to survive this crisis, a lot more funding will be needed by individuals, businesses and state and local governments.

So, we'll be seeing at least a few more funding bills coming out of Congress in the coming months.

And that's in addition to the significant "propping up" being done to various sectors of the U.S. economy by the Federal Reserve Bank.

The amount of money being spent to keep things "normalized" is astounding.  And, unfortunately, not without consequence.

But, now's not the time to worry about that.

Let's just hope when I write this Unemployment Update post next week, the filing numbers continue their downward trajectory.  And at a significant pace.