It’s true several companies — UPS, Macy’s and Levi’s, the Los Angeles Times — have announced job cuts recently.
But that doesn’t seem to have poked the bear too much in terms of first-time filings for unemployment benefits.
Last week, the number of Americans filing for jobless benefits dropped despite all those recent layoff announcements.
Applications for unemployment benefits fell to 218,000 for the week ending Feb. 3, according to statistics reported Thursday by the Labor Department. That’s a drop of 9,000 such claims.
The four-week average of claims, which evens out some of the weekly volatility, increased by 3,750 to 212,250.
Weekly unemployment claims have remained at extraordinarily low levels despite efforts by the U.S. Federal Reserve to cool the economy.
The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate 11 times beginning in March 2022 in an effort to bring down the four-decade high inflation that took hold after an unusually strong economic rebound from the COVID-19 recession of 2020.
Though inflation has eased considerably in the past year, the Labor Department reported recently that overall prices rose 0.3% from November to December and were up 3.4% from 12 months earlier, according to a report by the Associated Press.
The Fed has left rates unchanged at its last four meetings. Earlier this month, Fed Chair Jerome Powell told the CBS news magazine “60 Minutes” the board was “on track” to make three rate cuts later this year.
U.S. employers added 353,000 jobs in January in the latest sign of the economy’s continuing ability to shrug off the highest interest rates in two decades.
The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, and has been below 4% for 24 straight months — two full years — the longest such streak since the 1960s.
In total, 1.87 million Americans were collecting jobless benefits during the week that ended Jan. 27, a decrease of 23,000 from the previous week.
