Weekly unemployment claims ticked up last week but by a smaller than expected margin, picking up slightly after reaching the lowest level since November during the prior week.
The Department of Labor released its weekly report on new jobless claims on Thursday, and here are the main data points compared to consensus data compiled by Bloomberg:
Initial jobless claims, week ended Feb. 27: 745,000 vs. 750,000 expected, and a revised 736,000 during the prior week
Continuing claims, week ended Feb. 20: 4.3 million vs. 4.3 million expected, and 4.4 million during the prior week
Initial jobless claims edged up only slightly after sinking far more than expected during the week ended Feb. 20, though at least some of that drop appeared to have stemmed from data collection issues due to the extreme winter weather blanketing the country mid-month. Still, the stabilization below 750,000 suggested unemployment trends were improving even independent of temporary factors.
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“We expected a substantially bigger rebound after the huge winter storm pushed claims down, so this reading suggests that the underlying trend in layoffs is falling, thanks to the reopening now underway across many states,” Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in an email Thursday morning. “As always, though, two good weeks in this volatile series don’t prove anything, but whatever happens next week, we expect the trend to fall sharply over the next few months, provided the new COVID variants don’t trigger a spring wave in cases and, more importantly, hospitalizations.”
