2/4/21: U.S. New Unemployment Claims

Continuing with the coverage of core statistics for the U.S. labor markets performance. This post covers new unemployment claims through March 20, 2021, with the last two weeks of data being preliminary estimates.

In the week through March 20, 2021, new unemployment claims fell to 656,789, or four weeks running total of 2,892,799 dipping below the peak of the Great Recession levels of 4 weeks total of 3,313,000. This is the good news.

The bad news is that latest reading would rank 58th worst in the history of the weekly series, if we are to exclude the Covid19 period. Another part of the bad news is that last week's weekly rate of decline of 100,412, the fastest rate of decline in four weeks, is actually slower than average weekly rate of decline for the pandemic period. 

4 weeks running average rate of improvement in new unemployment claims is just 14,943. Which means that at this rate of labor market improvements, it will take 30.6 weeks to regain pre-Covid lows of new claims.

Things are improving. But they are improving at less than impressive rates.

Note:

• Post 1 covering continued unemployment claims is available here: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/04/2421-us-continued-unemployment-claims.html
• Post 2 covering labor force participation rate and employment-to-population ratio is available here: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/04/2421-us-labor-force-participation-and.html
• Post 3 covering non-farm payrolls is available here: https://trueeconomics.blogspot.com/2021/04/2421-us-non-farm-payrolls.html.