Weekly Jobless Claims from the U.S. Labor Department managed to break about a long streak of being back above 400,000. This week’s reading came in 398,000 versus a 425,000 estimate by Bloomberg. This morning’s report also shows that the prior week’s reading was revised to 422,000 from 418,000.
The report appears to be the first sub-400,000 weekly claims since the beginning of April.
The four-week average was down 8,500 to 413,750. The army of unemployed measured by the continuing jobless claims, which has a one-week lag, fell by 17,000 to 3,703,000.
Another metric was the unemployment rate for workers with unemployment insurance also came down to 2.9% from 3.0%.
We will need to pay close attention to how these jobs numbers come out each week now that large corporations have started to announce layoff plans again this year. Still, at least we showed that we can finally get back under the 400,000 mark again (if they are not revised higher).
JON C. OGG
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