The U.S. Department of Labor reported on Thursday that in the week ending April 17, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted new unemployment claims was 547,000, a decrease of 39,000 from the previous week’s revised level.
Today’s weekly jobless claims numbers are a welcome surprise after more than a year of elevated initial filings and are down sharply from a peak of 900,000 in early January 2021. But ABC notes that they’re still far above the roughly 230,000 level that prevailed before the viral outbreak ripped through the economy in March of last year.
“With 135 million Americans having received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccination and the economy opening up more each day, the number of job opportunities will continue to rise,” said James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, a European bank.
Some parts of the weekly jobs report have remained stubbornly high, indicating we are still on a rocky road to full economic recovery. Close to 17.4 million people were continuing to collect unemployment benefits in the week that ended April 3, up from 16.9 million in the previous week.
Most of the increases are in California and Texas, two states that process their claims every other week. But the number of ongoing recipients has declined by about 2.3 million from early March when the figure was 19.7 million, so this still means that the overall job market has been making steady gains.
“This dip in jobless claims looks good in isolation but what really matters is that it confirms that last week’s unexpected plunge was no fluke,” wrote Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “We expect further declines over the next few months as the reopening continues, while payroll growth will accelerate markedly.”
