Michael Hiltzik: Could unemployment reach Great Depression levels? Yes, but …

The sudden, devastating rise in U.S. joblessness during the coronavirus crisis has evoked images from the Great Depression - abject destitution leading to bread lines and apples sold on street corners, and so on.

Comparisons of the surging unemployment rate to that of the 1930s have become commonplace: "Coronavirus could lead to the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression," declared Vox in an example picked at random.

Economist Miguel Faria-e-Castro of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis raised eyebrows and blood pressures with what he called a "back of the envelope" projection of a 32.1% unemployment rate for the second quarter of this year. That would exceed the peak of 24.9% reached, according to some estimates, in 1933.

Faria-e-Castro's paper came out on March