Sixteen million Americans filed for unemployment in the last three weeks in the wake of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. In Massachusetts, a new analysis from the Pioneer Institute says that the unemployment rate could hit 25 percent by June.
“I have never more hoped to be wrong in anything that we’ve done than with this,” Charles Chieppo, senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, told Emily Rooney on Greater Boston Friday.
“I would say, certainly, this is not gonna be a Great Depression kind of thing in the way that it took over a decade to come back [from that],” Chieppo said. “But I think it’s probably a little wishful thinking to think it’s just immediately gonna bounce back.”
He cautioned that the pandemic was “uncharted territory,” and therefore, trying to give an economic prognosis involved a fair amount of guesswork.
“We don’t know when the spread of the virus is gonna be controlled, and it seems to me that the longer it is before it’s controlled, the longer it’s gonna take to actually bounce back from the loss that we’re going through right now,” he said.
