The beleaguered U.S. labor market is absorbing a fresh wave of jobless workers, with 778,000 new unemployment claims filed in the latest week, as soaring COVID-19 infections lead states and cities to clamp down on public life.
The Department of Labor released its weekly report on initial jobless claims Thursday morning and here are the numbers compared to what Wall Street expected, according to Bloomberg:
Initial jobless claims, week ended Nov. 21: 778,000 vs. 730,000 expected, and a revised 748,000 during prior week
Continuing claims, week ended Nov. 14: 6.1 million vs. 6 million expected, and 6.4 million during prior week
Despite weeks of improvement, the previous week’s figures revised upward by 6,000, and the four-week moving average jumping to 748,000 – a gain of 5,000 from the prior week. However, continuing claims – a closely watched metric of how the labor market is faring – edged down by nearly 300,000 jobs from the prior week. The previous figure was also revised lower, albeit modestly.
Click here to read more from Javier E. David at Yahoo Finance.
All told, new unemployment claims have held below the 1 million water mark for over 3 months and remain well below the pandemic-era peak of nearly 7 million.
The Department of Labor noted that total number of people claiming benefits in all programs in the latest week was 20,452,223, which increased by over 135,000 from the prior period and exponentially higher than the 1,487,844 people in the comparable year-ago time frame.