WASHINGTON • New applications for USA unemployment insurance benefits rose last week to their highest rate since February, but remained at levels considered consistent with a firming labor market.
Advertisement
The USA Labor Department reports on the number of people who applied for unemployment benefits during the week ending June 20 on Thursday, June 25, 2015.
The holiday and seasonal shutdowns “always create a few volatility”, said Tom Simons, a money market economist at Jefferies LLC in New York, whose forecast for 290,000 initial claims was among the closest in the Bloomberg survey.
A Labor Department expert said there is nothing abnormal among the most up-to-date claims results. The lower the number of initial jobless claims, the stronger the job market, and vice versa. The four-week moving average was 279,500, an increase of 4,500 from the previous week’s revised average.
The timing and extent of closings to re-tool auto factories for the new model year is typically difficult for the government to gauge, causing claims to gyrate at this time of year.
One negative development in Thursday’s report was that the total number of people receiving jobless benefits, which extend up to 26 weeks of unemployment, rose very slight, by 758. The jobless rate fell to 5.3 percent, the lowest level in seven years.
The monthly jobs numbers released last week showed that monthly net payroll jobs have grown by 221,000 for the past three months.
Other labor market indicators have not performed as well – a fact that Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen often cites in explaining why the central bank has not yet begun raising interest rates.
Advertisement
The Fed released minutes of its June meeting on Wednesday.
