Last week, when consensus was expecting a "modest" 281K initial jobless claims, we said that SouthBay Research's Andrew Zatlin, who has regularly been the most accurate predictor of labor market prints, expected no less than 2.4 million initial jobless claims. He was off by a million: the actual number was a staggering 3.28 million, quadruple the previous record set in the depths of the global financial crisis. The number was also too low in light of anecdotal evidence of the tsunami of unemployed workers, with a New York State official saying that the unemployment system had received a record 1.2 million calls just ... (full story)