Number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits dips
The number of Americans filing for jobless aid has fallen for two weeks in a row, even as the broader economy continues to struggle.
Some 847,000 people applied for unemployment benefits the week ending January 23, the Labor Department said Thursday. That's a drop of 67,000 from the prior week's figure. Another 426,000 applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a program for gig workers and people who are self-employed. Before the pandemic, the number of weekly unemployment applications had never exceeded 700,000.
"Even with little substantial movement over the last two weeks, magnitude remains a problem," AnnElizabeth Konkel, economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said in a note.
Roughly 18 million people were receiving some sort of federal or state unemployment assistance as of January 9, a sign the job market has yet to recover from the damage inflicted by the public health crisis. Economists expect layoffs to remain high until coronavirus vaccines broadly distributed.
"Additional fiscal stimulus and broader vaccine diffusion should support an improved labor market in the spring, but claims are expected to remain high in the near term as the pandemic continues to restrict activity, with new strains of the virus a concern," economists at Oxford Economics wrote in a note.
This is a developing story.
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Category : Unemployment,World
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