The number of Americans applying for jobless benefits went up by a small amount last week, to 232,000. This is another low number that shows few people are losing their jobs even though it’s getting harder to find work.
The number of new claims went up by 4,000 in the week ending August 17. This is up from 228,000 the week before, the government said Thursday.
Based on seasonally adjusted numbers, economists asked by the Wall Street Journal thought that there would be 230,000 new claims.
In the past year, the job situation has gotten a lot worse. A bad jobs report in July made people worry about a recession again, and on Wednesday, the government said that from April 2023 to March 2024, 818,000 fewer jobs were created than had been thought before.
The Federal Reserve is ready to lower interest rates at its next meeting in mid-September because the job market is getting weaker and inflation is slowing down. Some people on Wall Street are wondering if the Fed will cut rates even more quickly than the 25-basis-point cut that is predicted.
Important facts: The number of new claims looked even better when compared to real filings, that is, before seasonal changes were made.
It has been since October of last year that so few claims have been filed, with only 191,576 being made. It’s not often that raw claims are that low.
In 40 of the 53 states and territories that send these numbers to the federal government, the number of new jobless claims went down. In the other 13 states, new claims went up.
The government said that the number of people already getting unemployment payments in the U.S. went up by 4,000 to 1.86 million.
It’s taking longer for people who lose their jobs to find new ones, as these so-called continuing claims keep going up.
In the big picture, it’s getting harder to find work, but most people who already have one won’t be fired for a while, unless things go badly.
Why? Economists say that as long as the economy is growing and sales stay steady, companies probably won’t fire many workers. This is because they had a hard time finding workers during the worst labor shortage in decades.
Also, the Fed is ready to lower interest rates because the job market has slowed down. Lower interest rates on loans are likely to boost the economy and could cause a few more jobs to open up.
One big picture thing is that the claims data doesn’t change our view that, even though the job market is weakening, it’s not bad enough for the Fed to do anything more than cut rates by 25 basis points at their meeting in September, said Nancy Van Houten, a senior economist at Oxford Economics.
