New Unemployment Claims Up Slightly Over Previous Week

New jobless claims for the week ending Feb. 27 came in at 745,000, up from last week’s revised level of 736,000, according to the Thursday (March 4) weekly report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The previous week’s level was revised up by 6,000 from 730,000. 

The advance number of weekly unemployment claims during the week ending Feb. 20 was 4.295 million, down 124,000 from the previous week’s unrevised level of 4.419 million. 

The total number of continued weeks claimed for benefits in all programs for the week ending Feb. 13 was 18,026,537, down 1,018,763 from the previous week.

By way of comparison, there were 2,092,483 weekly claims filed for benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2020. 

“I think consumers are ready to spend more on services. They’re ready to travel, they’re ready to go out to restaurants. So I would expect we see very strong services job growth as we get towards the middle of 2021,” Gus Faucher, PNC chief economist, told Yahoo Finance Live. “And we’ll make a serious dent in the labor market, and I would expect that we’ll be back to our pre-pandemic level of employment sometime in the second half of 2022.”

Some 19 million Americans were still claiming benefits across all programs as of Feb. 6, per Yahoo. That figure includes 12.5 million people on Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which extends benefits to gig workers and adds up to 24 weeks of additional benefits.

“The labor market is continuing to gradually improve,” said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco, told The New York Times. “Job growth will accelerate, perhaps as soon as the second quarter, with decent gains in leisure and hospitality and travel.”

Weekly filings for unemployment have been largely declining in 2021, with a peak of 900,000 in January. The pre-pandemic peak was 695,000, per the Times.

Data from the Federal Reserve Beige Book in May 2020 indicated that businesses in the U.S. were struggling to hang on as the pandemic took hold in March 2020. The Beige Book surveys businesses nationwide about the state of business conditions.