Mammoth jobless claims data expected, China rejects U.S. charge on virus numbers, and finally some good news for oil. MillionsWeekly jobless claims numbers due 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time are expected to show another record high with the median expectation from economists surveyed by Bloomberg for 3.7 million new claims. Last week's total of 3.28 million was four times the previous high in data going back to 1967. Rocketing job losses are a global phenomenon, with data from Spain, the United Kingdom, and Canada all pointing to a huge increase. The situation is likely to continue to worsen as employers seek more payroll cuts. Boeing Co. is expected to announce voluntary buyout offers to its 161,000 workers today. Falling outChina has rejected a U.S. intelligence claim that the country concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak there. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said that China had been open and transparent in its actions, accusing U.S. officials of wanting to "shift the blame." In the U.S., the toll from the virus seems set to worsen with reports yesterday showing the Federal Emergency Management Agency has requested 100,000 body bags for civilian use. Globally, the number of cases is set to pass 1 million with over 47,000 deaths attributed to the outbreak. Oil bounceCrude surged more than 12% on reports that China is set to take advantage of low prices and start buying for its strategic reserve. The news, though welcome for oil producing nations, comes with a sting in the tail as the cost of shipping the commodity around the globe has sky-rocketed recently. It now costs $10 a barrel to move crude from the U.S. to China. President Donald Trump met with executives from the country's oil industry yesterday as he steps up efforts to intervene in the rout which threatens to wipe out tens of thousands of jobs in the shale industry. Markets quietAfter a month of breakneck moves, global equity markets are having a relatively subdued session. Overnight, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index slipped 0.3% while Japan's Topix index closed 1.6% lower. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index was 0.1% higher at 5:50 a.m. with oil and gas stocks jumping on the crude rebound. S&P 500 futures pointed to a solid gain at the open ahead of claims data, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 0.597% and gold was flat. Coming up…As well as the jobs data, the U.S. trade balance for February is published at 8:30 a.m. Factory while durable goods orders numbers for that month are released at 10:00 a.m. In earnings today, investors will keep a close eye on Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.'s report as the pharmacy retailer may have some insights into consumer behavior amid the outbreak. The Federal Reserve, which yesterday said it would allow banks take on more leverage to help absorb a severe lack of liquidity for Treasuries, will run its usual two overnight $500 billion repo operations. What we've been readingThis is what's caught our eye over the last 24 hours. And finally, here's what Joe's interested in this morningIn the wake of the global financial crisis, there was a major debate between the "cyclical" and the "structural" view about why the unemployment rate remained so elevated for so long. The cyclical view was that there was persistently weak demand for goods and services post crisis, and so employers had little reason to hire workers to produce them. The structural view sounded more sophisticated. It argued things like how there was a "new economy" and how the people looking for work didn't have the skills needed by the employers looking for labor. (There were even more exotic theories put forward, such as the idea that many young men just weren't looking for work because they were at home playing video games.) One implication of the structural view was that stimulus was pointless, because if the issue was not just about supply and demand for labor, then any attempt to get people in the workforce faster would just result in more inflation. The structuralists lost the debate and the cyclicalists won. The unemployment rate fell below what any mainstream economist thought was possible without a pickup in inflation or even rapid wage growth. And by the tail end of the boom, employers started training even more marginalized parts of the labor market (such as former prison inmates) to satisfy their demand for workers. Unemployment is absolutely soaring again. Hopefully, once the acute phase of the crisis is over, many people will quickly come back to work. But not everyone will be able to. So I expect the "cycs vs. the strucs" debate to not only come back, but to be even more intense this time around. That's because there will be unevenness in the speed at which different industries come back online, so to speak. Some companies will go under for good. Bars and restaurants may come back faster than hotels, as people may feel more comfortable eating out before they feel comfortable traveling. And there may even be some permanent changes to economic behavior, such as more working from home (though that's still TBD). This will have long-term implications for which industries and companies thrive and which one's don't. Without a doubt, many people won't be able to go back to their old job or even their old industry. And so once again we'll be hearing about "labor mismatch" and other excuses for why we can't stimulate our way back to pre-crisis levels of unemployment. Another factor that will make this even worse is that we might, plausibly, see some inflation after the crisis, as a rebounding economy intersects with damaged supply chains, further emboldening claims that we can't afford to do stimulus. But the structuralists should be ignored again, and we shouldn't be satisfied with any recovery that falls short of full employment. It's despairing to think of what a second straight decade of under-employment would mean, just on a societal level. Beyond that, in a sufficiently robust economy, we know that employers will find and train the workers they previously had excluded from consideration. They were just doing that as recently as a few weeks ago. The structuralist view always sounds more sophisticated than the cyclical view. Saying things like "skills gap" or "labor mismatch" or "the need for more STEM education" sounds smart in speeches and columns. But as we just learned over the last 10 years, the economy can absorb many more workers than most people thought, as long as demand is sufficient. As of the last jobs report, the unemployment rate stood at just 3.5%. Let's get back there ASAP.  Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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