U.S. states saw a bigger-than-expected drop in initial unemployment claims filings last week as claims fell to a fresh pandemic-era low.
The Department of Labor released its weekly report on new jobless claims on Thursday, and here were the main metrics from the report compared to consensus data compiled by Bloomberg:
Initial jobless claims, week ended March 20: 684,000 vs. 730,000 expected, and a revised 781,000 during the prior week
Continuing claims, week ended March 13: 3.9 million vs. 4 million expected, and a revised 4.1 million during the prior week
Initial unemployment claims came in below 700,000 for the first time since mid-March 2020, declining more than anticipated after last week’s unexpected jump. The year-over-year improvement was even more pronounced: During the same week in 2020, new claims rocketed to more than 3 million as the pandemic’s initial impacts reverberated across the labor market.
Click here to see the full report from Emily McCormick at Yahoo Finance.
“The claims data can be noisy, and we do not want to extrapolate too much signal from just one week of data, but overall it looks like the trend in initial claims has been moving down lately,” JPMorgan economist Daniel Silver wrote in a note Thursday morning. “This suggests that the labor market has been improving in recent months as the drag from COVID-19 has been reduced, in part due to vaccine distribution.”