U.S. unemployment will reach up to 20% for at least a moment.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Prediction: Statements about events outside the person's control, checked once they fell due: did they come true?
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
Said for an organisation they lead or work for; it counts on both records.
What would count as true or false
The prediction is that US unemployment would reach roughly 20%, even briefly, during the COVID-19 shock of 2020–2021. The primary measure is the official BLS headline monthly unemployment rate (U-3). True: U-3 reached 18% or higher in any month of 2020–2021. Mostly true: U-3 peaked between 15% and 18%, or U-3 peaked lower but BLS's own published estimate of the rate corrected for the misclassification of workers as employed reached 18% or more. Mostly false: the peak was 10% to under 15% and no BLS-adjusted rate reached 18%. False: unemployment stayed below 10%. Broader measures such as U-6 and private estimates do not count toward true.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (3)
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E1 Adjusting the Unemployment Thermometer Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF Economic Letter 2020-27) · 3 September 2020
“Interestingly, our estimate is in line with the BLS’s own corrected unemployment rate of 19.1%, which is based on a different methodology (BLS 2020a).”
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E2 Adjusting the Unemployment Thermometer Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF Economic Letter 2020-27) · 3 September 2020
“the official unemployment rate climbed to 14.7% in April, then rapidly declined to 11.1% by the end of the second quarter.”
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E3 Adjusting the Unemployment Thermometer Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF Economic Letter 2020-27) · 3 September 2020
“Consistent with the downward bias created by ambiguity in the CPS questionnaire, unemployment reached 20.5% in April instead of the official 14.7%.”
Reasoning
The San Francisco Fed reports that the official unemployment rate (U-3) rose to 14.7% in April 2020 and then fell quickly to 11.1% by the end of the second quarter (E2). That is below the 18% needed for true. The same letter says BLS's own unemployment rate, corrected for workers misclassified as employed, was 19.1% (E1). The authors' separate estimate was 20.5% for April (E3). Under the criteria, a U-3 peak below 18% combined with a BLS-corrected rate of 18% or more makes the claim mostly true.
Cite this claim
Jeremy Grantham, “U.S. unemployment will reach up to 20% for at least a moment.” (said 2020). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_d69abe0df1b6, method 0.1.0+28da144b, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_d69abe0df1b6
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.