Record 6.6 MILLION File Jobless Claims As Coronavirus COVID-19 Outbreak Ramps Up

Economic deterioration in the United States due to strict COVID-19 “social distancing” measures and “non-essential business” shutdowns has been surprisingly fast — with a new 6.6 million total jobless claims being filed last week, already dwarfing the prior week’s startling numbers.

Bill Gates recently spoke to CBS News about the economic and social impact of COVID-19.

As Lewis Goodall, an editor at BBC Newsnight, put it succinctly in a tweet earlier this morning: “NEW. 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week. That figure smashes the record breaking numbers from the week before (3.3 million).

In other words, 3% of the US population has registered for unemployment benefit in a fortnight.”

With cruise lines and airlines almost non-operational, and the (usually) busy streets of Washington DC eerily almost silent and empty at night, we are indeed in strange times.

Back in 2015, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates predicted a pandemic like this could cost the economy $4 trillion or more. And in a brand new wide-ranging interview with CBS News on the coronavirus pandemic just the other day, Gates explained that his estimate may be too small, and that it could take months before things are back to normal in the United States.

The good news, however, is that FULCRUM is seeing unprecedented traffic — while millions are at home practicing social distancing in an effort to curb COVID-19’s eventual death toll, they are also reading about… for the first time, in many cases… the scandals that we have published on over the past several years.

Subscriptions to the newsletter we publish are soaring, and for a limited time we are offering that newsletter to anyone who pledges $5 or more on our Patreon page. We understand during these unusual times everyone wants access to the information and analysis we put out, and $5 is the lowest barrier to entry ever for getting the FULCRUM subscription.

We’re also seeing an uptick in referrals through our affiliate program.

So all is not lost, and there may be other unintended positive social benefits of keeping the whole planet at home on the Internet for a few weeks — this gets us all on the same page across the country and even across the world, whatever that page may be, and this is a truly rare thing. The Great Awakening, if it hasn’t started before, definitely has now.

Hang in there.