Two week jobless increase worse than first 6 months of Great Recession

• Adding it all up, Joe Brusuelas says the 10M initial jobless claims over the past two weeks should send the unemployment rate over 10%. That two-week increase is a bigger number than the first six months of the Great Recession one decade ago.
• Policymakers, he says, should brace for total claims to soon approach 15M. Forget the V-shaped recovery, says Brusuelas, a larger fiscal aid package will be necessary, and recovery will take years.
• The team at Bank of America, meanwhile, expects 16M-20M job losses and the unemployment rate climbing to 15.6% in a few months. They see GDP contracting an annualized 7% in Q1, 30% in Q2, and 1% in Q3 - this is interesting as until very recently, nearly all economists were expecting a sizable GDP bounce in Q3. The cumulative GDP decline, says BofA, could be north of 10%, or the deepest recession on record.