26 million Americans are out of work. Are we heading toward Great Depression territory?

Twenty-six million Americans have filed for unemployment since the coronavirus pandemic started. The cratering job numbers are bolstering some economists’ predictions that by summer, we’ll be in Great Depression territory, with an unemployment rate around 25%.

“A lot of the economic data that we’re going to see are going to compress several regular recessions worth of misery into a few months,” says Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of Pantheon Macroeconomics.