Jobless claims see their highest one-week spike since 2020
The number of Americans claiming unemployment benefits rose to 236,000 during the week ending Dec. 6, the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday. That's a 44,000 increase from the number of claims during Thanksgiving week, the federal agency said.
The spike marks the highest jump since March 2020, economists at Trading Economics noted. Before last week, jobless claims had been dropping for four consecutive weeks.
Some economists said they expect jobless claims to continue climbing, in part because major employers have announced layoffs this fall across industry sectors. Layoff announcements soared in October, then eased in November, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
"The jobless claims numbers are no longer the outliers in the set of data pointing to a weakening U.S. labor market," Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, said in a social media post Thursday. "As expected, last week’s drop in initial jobless claims proved to be a headfake, impacted by the Thanksgiving holiday."
Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said the nation should not "read too much into the jump in jobless claims."
"Smoothing it out, this still looks like an economy averaging 215,000 to 220,000 new jobless claims a week," Long said in a note Thursday. "That’s not a cause for concern."
New year could be tough test for lower-wage earners, report says
Rising inflation and slower wage growth could hit lower-income households especially hard in the new year, a new Bank of America analysis shows.
Lower-income consumers tend to spend more on necessities, such as food and housing. Higher shelter costs "have been the most persistent upward mover" in consumer expenditures and have hurt discretionary budgets, according to the report.
"The pullback in discretionary spending among lower-income households in 2025 reflects their limited ability to substitute purchases amid elevated inflation," the report stated. "Even modest changes in purchasing power can compound over time when combined with simultaneous changes in income."
Job openings remain stuck at 7.7 million so far this fall
Employers posted 7.7 million job openings in October, the same amount tallied in September, the U.S. Department of Labor said Tuesday.
The federal agency's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, report also noted that roughly 2.9 million Americans quit their jobs in October, while 1.9 million were let go. Those figures are roughly the same as what registered in September, Labor Department officials said.
Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said there are three major takeaways from this week's JOLTS: the rate of hiring continues to be low; the rate of those quitting is the nation's lowest since 2014, and layoffs are up slightly. The nation's unemployment rate "can quickly spike" if layoffs continue rolling in and employers slow down their hiring, Gould said in a social media post.
"Not only will the unemployment rate spike if layoffs continue to rise as hiring remains depressed, but it may explain why the young adult unemployment has been rising as it becomes increasingly difficult to break into the labor market as employers and workers sit tight under economic uncertainty," Gould said.
About 5.1 million were hired in October, according to the JOLTS report, down from 5.3 million in September.