Trump inherited a booming economy and handed Biden a ruined country with record unemployment figures. And now that?

Former President Donald Trump has left the new Administration with an economy that is practically in ruins, specialists warn, with almost 10 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic and a severe recession. 

The economic challenge facing incoming President Joe Biden became even more apparent this Thursday morning, just the second day of his term, with the new Labor Department report on jobless claims.

In the last week,

900,000 people applied for subsidies for the first time

, a figure lower than the previous week, but still extraordinarily high compared to pre-pandemic numbers. 

More than any other president, Trump correlated the general health of the economy with the performance of the stock market, even during the pandemic, as infections accelerated in the country and families struggled to pay their basic bills with few options in the market. labor. 

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“If you are the ordinary person,

do you care if the Gross Domestic Product was 3.2% or 3.4%?

No, you care if you have a job

, "Thomas Martin, manager of Globalt Investments, told NBC News.

A pedestrian walks past an empty space in Boston.

With the closure of activities due to the increase in cases, hundreds of thousands of residents are requesting unemployment assistance in the United States.

New restrictions and activity closures due to the increase in coronavirus cases have decimated employment in the restaurant and leisure and entertainment industries.

And the future outlook is not encouraging. 

"The labor market is extremely weak," Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, told The New York Times.

"It's

going to be quite difficult for the next few months,

" he anticipated.

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The Labor Department reported that 424,000 applications were also filed last week for the federal pandemic emergency program for the self-employed, part-time workers and others who are not normally eligible for state unemployment benefits. 

The state in which Trump found the White House and markets when he came to power was very different.

“

The economy was in very good shape

.

Nothing was really out of balance, "Dan North, an economist at Euler Hermes, told NBC News. 

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For much of his tenure, Trump found it easy to take credit for rising stocks.

The Republican's promises to lower taxes and eliminate regulations helped fuel optimism in companies and, consequently, markets, which already benefited from the good economic management of his predecessor, Barack Obama. 

However,

Trump wasted some of the boost he received

, analysts say.

"He did quite a few things to really impede the progress of the stock market," Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for the Independent Advisor Alliance, told NBC News.

The pandemic hit the economy in the spring.

The CARES Act, the stimulus package approved in April by Congress, together with aggressive measures by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and flood the financial system with liquidity, were able to halt the market decline.

In the months that followed, Wall Street recovered, but in the meantime, small businesses and entrepreneurs continued to suffer the consequences of the crisis. 

Unlike Trump, Biden is more likely to focus on containing the pandemic and repairing the job market, specialists say.

AP

"The trade war with China was by far the most damaging," Zaccarelli added.

Experts have considered the confrontation with the Asian country a failure: it ended in an uneasy truce in early 2020, with

little profit for US consumers

or companies.

"While you could say that what Trump inherited was a normal stock market, Joe Biden gets one that is on the extremes," Martin explained. 

However, Biden is unlikely to take the stock market as the barometer of his immediate success, experts say.

The president has assured that he will focus instead on the health and well-being of Americans. 

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Biden is launching a new strategy to tackle the pandemic focused on producing more vaccines and increasing test sites.

Some economists believe that this bet can work. 

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"

There is no better economic stimulus than the successful launch of a vaccine

," Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago, told The New York Times.

Vaccines reduce the risk of contagion and will provide a basis for economic activities to resume more safely. 

Even so, the fear of the possible arrival of

a more acute recession

remains

.

The start of the campaign in December brought optimism about possible change in the short term, but slow implementation in many parts of the country has set those hopes back. 

With information from NBC News, The New York Times and CNBC.