Jobless claims in the week ending Oct. 10 increased to 898,000, up 53,000 from the previous week’s number, which was revised to 845,000 from the initial 840,000, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) reported on Thursday (Oct. 15).
The new numbers reflect the seventh week in a row that initial claims came in below 1 million. New claims, however, have topped 800,000 for as many weeks, with more layoffs anticipated. Last week, continuing claims fell below 11 million for the first time since the end of March.
“The decline in continuing claims is welcome, but initial claims offer a better read on the real-time state of the labor market, and the downward trend has stalled, more or less,” Ian Shepherdson, chief economist for U.K.-based economic research consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics, a said in a recent note, Yahoo Finance reports.
Analysts expected 840,000 Americans to file for first-time unemployment benefits last week. That would have been lower than the previous week’s numbers.
“The current picture suggests that growth has slowed sharply in the past three months, and that the labor market is stalling again in the face of rising infections and the sudden ending of federal government support to unemployed people,” Shepherdson said in an earlier note.
The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending Sept. 26 were in Hawaii (17.9), California (16.1), Nevada (12.5), Puerto Rico (10.5), Louisiana (10.3), Georgia (10.1), New York (10.0), District of Columbia (9.1), Michigan (9.0), and New Mexico (8.8).
The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending Oct. 3 were in Florida (+9,933), Illinois (+6,877), Massachusetts (+4,021), North Carolina (+2,907) and Maryland (+1,714), while the largest decreases were in New
Jersey (-3,504), Kansas (-3,312), Pennsylvania (-3,111), Louisiana (-2,835) and Washington (-2,474).
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