24/7 Wall St.

No one is getting fired anymore. The U.S. Department of Labor released its reading on weekly jobless claims, which fell by 2,000 to a mere 210,000. This number used to run closer to and even above 300,000, but that’s becoming ancient history at a time when unemployment sits around 4% and there are more job openings than there are belly buttons available to fill them.

Dow Jones was calling for 215,000 claims in the past week, and the four-week average was down another 1,750 to 213,750 claims. The prior week’s reading was left unchanged at 212,000, and that means that the Labor Department wasn’t able to find that many firings last week either.

Another benefit seen in the Labor Department’s report was that the continuing jobless claims, the army of the persistently unemployed, which is reported with a one-week lag, fell by 2,000 to 1,727,000.

Also shown was that the total number of people who claimed benefits in all programs for the week ending August 4 was 1,703,755. That is lower by 52,458 from the previous week. There were 1,920,823 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2017.

Lower and lower jobless claims. Translation: higher and higher job security.