Weekly Jobless Claims Hardly Weak

The U.S. Labor Department has released its weekly jobless claims reading for the past week, and this marked the 15th consecutive week with a claims report of fewer than 300,000. This appears to be the longest run under the 300,000 mark in 14 or 15 years.

Claims fell last week by 12,000 to a seasonally adjusted 267,000. Bloomberg was calling for a rate of 275,000 and Dow Jones was calling for a reading of 276,000.

Another solid point was that the prior week’s reading of 279,000 jobless claims was left unchanged. Also, the Labor Department said that there were no special factors in this week’s jobless claims report.

The four-week average also fell by 2,000 to 276,750. Another drop was in the army of the unemployed, measured by the continuing claims. This fell by another 50,000 claims to 2.22 million, although the data on continuing claims comes with a one-week lag.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said:

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending May 30 was 2,142,307, an increase of 79,821 from the previous week. There were 2,479,465 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2014. … The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending May 30 were in Alaska (3.1), Puerto Rico (3.0), the Virgin Islands (2.7), New Jersey (2.5), California (2.4), Connecticut (2.3), Nevada (2.2), Pennsylvania (2.2), West Virginia (2.2), and Wyoming (2.1).

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