The numbers: The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits dropped sharply for the second week in a row, to 227,000. This is after a rise in claims earlier in the month following two big hurricanes.
The number of new claims dropped from 242,000 the week before to 15,000 in the seven days ending October 19. The government said Thursday.
Because of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, there were a lot more new claims in early October than at any other time in the past year. Because of the damage, a lot of people in places like North Carolina and Florida couldn’t go to work.
Now that the pandemic is over, the number of new jobless claims has back to the very low levels that have been a sign of a tight job market.
Based on seasonally adjusted numbers, economists asked by the Wall Street Journal thought that there would be 245,000 new claims.
Important information: The low number of layoffs was shown by U.S. jobless claims based on real filings, that is, before seasonal adjustments.
Last week, raw claims went down from 225,269 to 202,365. During the summer, they had less than 200,000 for eight weeks in a row, which doesn’t happen very often.
In 39 of the 53 states and territories that send these numbers to the federal government, the number of new jobless claims went down.
The government said that the number of people already getting unemployment payments in the U.S. went up by 28,000 to 1.9 million. They are now above the levels before the plague.
Over the past year, these “continuing claims” have slowly gone up because it takes longer for people who lose their jobs to find new ones.
In general, jobless claims are very low, but they are less likely to be correct from November to January, which is the holiday season. A lot of people are hired for short-term jobs and then fired.
The Federal Reserve has lowered interest rates, but the economy is still expected to grow at a rate that keeps unemployment and layoffs low.
In the future: “These job losses won’t worry the Fed too much, since layoffs across the economy are still low,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, said, “We think the job market is loose enough to keep further rate cuts on track.”
