OAN Staff James Meyers
12:19 PM – Thursday, October 10, 2024
The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits just jumped to its highest level in over a year, a new report revealed on Thursday.
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The Labor Department announced on Thursday that applications for unemployment benefits claims jumped by 33,000 to 258,000 for the week of October 3rd. That marks the most since August 5th, 2023, and well above the 229,000 that analysts were expecting at the very worst.
Economists cited big jumps in jobless benefit applications last week across U.S. states that were most negatively impacted by Hurricane Helene, including Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
“Claims will likely continue to be elevated in states affected by Helene and Hurricane Milton as well as the Boeing strike until it is resolved,” said Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist of Oxford Economics. “We think, though, that the Fed will view these impacts as temporary and still expect it to lower rates by (25 basis points) at the November meeting.”
Vanden Houten also maintained that applications rose due to the ongoing Boeing strike, with Washington state being the most heavily impacted.
The four-week average of claims rose by 6,750 to 231,000.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans collecting jobless benefits rose by 42,000 to close to 1.86 million for the week of September 28th, the most since late July.
Recent labor market data has suggested that high interest rates may finally be taking a toll on the labor market.
The Federal Reserve’s goal is to achieve a rare “soft landing,” which is said to bring down inflation without causing a recession. The Fed implemented their first rate cut in four years after a series of rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 pushed the federal funds rate to a two-decade high of 5.3%
In addition, unemployment applications hit 250,000 in late July.
In August, the Labor Department revealed that the U.S. economy added 818,000 fewer jobs from April 2023 through March of this year than were originally reported.
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