Jobless Claims Continue Falling: How Long Will the Labor Market Churn Along?

Last week, the U.S. saw fewer people applying for unemployment benefits, which shows that most jobs are being kept even though some other parts of the economy may be struggling.

On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that 16,000 less people applied for help with their job in the week ending April 22nd and only 230,000 people applied for it overall.

Over the past four weeks, more than 236,000 people are filing for unemployment benefits. At the beginning of this year, it was about 200,000. Meanwhile, in total 1.86 million were receiving these benefits during the week ending April 15th, which is 3,000 lesser than the previous week.

The number of people telling their bosses they need a job each week is still low, even though the stock market is going up and down, interest rates are getting higher and some people worry that the economy might not do so well.

The U.S. job market is still doing well even though other aspects of the economy are not doing great. The number of people out of work was 3.5% last month, which is a tiny bit higher than January’s all-time low at only 3.4%. During March, employers gave more than 236,000 jobs to people, even though it’s lower compared to 472,000 in January and 326,000 in February; this number is still pretty impressive when you look back at past history!

People who work at the Federal Reserve are worried that lots of people looking for jobs means more money going to workers wages, which will cause prices to rise. To try to prevent this from happening, they increased their important interest rate nine times in just over a year. Even though inflation was really high last year, it’s gone down a bit since then, but is still higher than the target of 2%.

The Fed is trying to stop the economy from growing too much, which could cause prices to go up and push us into a recession. Unfortunately, many economists think that this year we might fall into a recession anyway.

This Thursday, it was reported that the U.S. economy has been slowing down since January until March – it is now only growing at 1.1% since the housing market and businesses are not making as much money due to higher interest rates on loans.