Unemployment appears to be going through the roof. Is it? This post was prompted by Jimmy Y, who e-mailed me with this: “States reported 1,284,252 persons claiming EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) benefits for the week ending Aug. 2, an increase of 570,284 from the prior week.  I looked at prior initial claims news releases and could NOT find any reference to the “570k prior week” statistic. Looks like the employment picture (or lack thereof) seems very ominous.”

Actually, unemployment has gone up 50% in just three weeks. In the week of July 12, 3.1 million people asked the government for unemployment checks. In the week of Aug. 2, our most recent week of full data, that number jumped to 4.66 million.

So what happened in those three weeks? Things couldn’t have gone that badly that fast, could they? Well, yes and no.

Chat 1: Americans requesting unemployment checks (in millions)

Source: BLS

Something big did happen. The government renewed the old 2002-2004 TEUC (Temporary Emergency Unemployment Compensation) program, calling it EUC 2008. That made 1.2 million more people eligible for unemployment checks — in addition to the 3.379 million already getting them.

In the above chart, the pink line represents the TEUC program from 2002-2004 and the brand new EUC 2008 program. The blue line is the ordinary program. The black line combines the two.

We haven’t reached the May 2002 peak of 5.13 million (3.7 million traditional, 1.4 million TEUC), but we’re getting close to where we were at the peak of that recession.

Many thanks to Jimmy Y and to Scott Gibbons at the ETA for patiently walking me through the unemployment claim data, and to Karen Ashworth at Global Insight (my data provider ) for providing the 2002-2004 TEUC weekly data.

In our weekly “Ask the Economist” feature, our resident Economist, Mike Donnelly, will be tackling your questions about the economy. If you’ve got a question — and no topic is too big or small — you’d like him to field, e-mail us at economist@pbp.com or leave your queries in the comments section.

Tags: Economist, EUC, Unemployment, Unemployment checks