A quarter of temporary layoffs in US will be permanent - Goldman Sachs

The US employers shed more than 22 million people from their payroll in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. And while 18 million of those were billed as temporary layoffs in April, analysts at Goldman Sachs now fear that almost a quarter of them will become permanent. 

Some 2 million of those individuals could remain unemployed well into 2021, Joseph Briggs, an economist at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a research note on Friday.

Key quotes (source: Bloomberg Quint)

The labor market seems poised for additional large job gains later this year.

Other patterns suggest that rehiring prospects for temporarily laid-off workers started to deteriorate in July.

Temporarily laid-off workers will boost the labor market recovery for the remainder of 2020, but will increasingly transition to permanent unemployment as time separated from their prior job increases.