New weekly jobless claims unexpectedly ticked higher last week in another sign of the labor market’schoppy recovery.
The Department of Labor released its weekly report on new jobless claims Thursday and here are the main metrics from the report, compared to consensus data compiled by Bloomberg:
Initial jobless claims, week ended July 3: 373,000 vs. 350,000 expected, and a revised 371,000 during prior week
Continuing claims, week ended June 26: 3.3 million vs. 3.3 million expected, and a revised 3.5 million during prior week
Despite the past week’s slight bump higher, initial unemployment claims have been on the decline for months now, as vaccinations enabled re-openings that in turn fueled a need for workers across industries to keep up with consumer demand. New jobless claims are now coming in at about half the level from the beginning of 2021 and have plummeted compared to the more than 1 million claims coming in per week this time last year.
“The consensus ignored the tendency for unadjusted claims to rise in weeks when July 4 falls on a Sunday, so the risk was always to the upside. But this is noise, not signal,” Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in an email. “The seasonal adjustments are struggling simultaneously with the July 4 holiday period and the annual automakers’ retooling shutdowns, which can make the headline numbers even more volatile than usual. The noise will persist through late July, but we have no doubt that the underlying trend will remain downwards.”
But Americans are still filing more first-time unemployment claims than they did in 2019, when new claims averaged just over 200,000 per week. And an elevated nearly 14.2 million Americans were still claiming some form of either state or federal unemployment benefits as of the week ended June 19.
Click here to see the full report from Emily McCormick at Yahoo Finance.
