Initial jobless claims fell more than expected, according to the Department of Labor’s weekly report…(DOL)
- Initial jobless claims were 238,000, a decrease of 23,000 from the previous week’s revised level.
- Economists had projected a smaller drop to 245,000 for the week ending January 29th.
Continuing claims, unfortunately, did not beat expectations for the week ending January 22nd…
- Continuing claims fell to 1.628M, a decrease of 44,000 from the previous weeks revised level.
- Economists had projected a bigger drop to 1.620M.
Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the second week of declines a good sign the omicron damage could be behind us…(Yahoo Finance)
- “The second straight hefty drop in jobless claims continues the reversal of the Omicron hit…We expect claims to keep falling — though they’ll likely be unchanged next week, thanks to a seasonal quirk — with new cycle lows likely in mid-March, about six weeks later than we would have expected in the absence of Omicron.”
After Wednesday’s ADP report it was nice to see a sign that the labor market is doing better than expected. However, this is unlucky to result in a positive jobs report on Friday. Ben Casselman at The New York Times highlights the wide rang of projections about Friday’s report, “Forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg expect the report to show that employers added 150,000 jobs in January, only modestly fewer than the 199,000 added in December. But there is an unusually wide range of estimates, from a gain of 250,000 jobs to a loss of 400,000.” This is thanks to the data for the report being collected in mid-January, near the peak of the wave of cases associated with the Omicron variant.
