Last week, there were an estimated 238,000 first-time claims filed for unemployment benefits, an increase of 4,000 from the week before, according to Department of Labor data released Wednesday. The latest uptick brought the four-week average of initial claims to its highest level since August 2023.
Also, Americans are staying unemployed for longer: Continuing claims, which are filed by people who have received benefits for at least a week or more, rose to their highest level since November 2021.
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Luke Tilley, Wilmington Trust’s chief economist, told BlogsTour he is closely watching an underlying datapoint of the monthly jobs report: .
“On a three-month average basis, it’s up about 200,000 people from last year,” Tilley said. “And that metric of permanent job losers, year-over-year, is almost never positive in an expansion. It was never positive between 2010 and 2019; it was not positive in between the tech crash recession of 2001 and then 2008.”
He added: “So when you sort of peel back the onion from what looks like very strong job growth in a raw number count and look at it a little closer … that paints a labor market that has normalized and is at risk of slipping.”
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Still, other measures of layoff activity haven’t shown a worrisome spike.
US-based employers announced fewer job cuts last month than they did in May; however, those layoff reports are trending well above last year’s, according to data released Wednesday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The outplacement and workplace research firm counted 48,786 cuts announced in June. That’s down nearly 24% from the 63,618 cuts announced in May, but 19.8% higher than the 40,709 cuts announced in June last year.
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