U.S. Initial Jobless Claims Fell to 712k Last Week
Yahoo Finance’s Emily McCormick joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the latest jobless claims numbers and the states hardest hit.
Video Transcript
AKIKO FUJITA: But let's first talk about record coronavirus cases and deaths rattling states across the country. CDC Director Robert Redfield warning the next few months will be, in his words, "the most difficult in the public health history of this nation." Hopes of a stimulus deal and new economic data, though, helping fuel some of the gains in the market today.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaking just a short time ago, saying that he's a "little more optimistic," his words, there are hopeful signs of a compromise on the stimulus deal by the end of the year. We've seen Treasury yields dip on optimism around these discussions. The 10-year hovering around 0.933 there.
Weekly initial jobless claims pointing to continued improvement in the labor market, though the momentum is slowing. 712,000 Americans filing for initial unemployment benefits. That is a decline from 63,000 from last week.
So let's begin with that data we got out this morning. Emily McCormick standing by for us for a walk-through of all the numbers we got today. Emily.
EMILY MCCORMICK: Akiko, this was the first decrease in new jobless claims we've seen in three weeks. Remember that we did get those back-to-back increases in mid-November as COVID-19 cases hit records in the US and new business restrictions came into effect. So taking a look at those headline numbers, initial jobless claims for the week ended November 28 coming in at 712,000. That was better than the 775,000 that had been expected, as well as a decrease from the upwardly revised 787,000 we saw during the previous week.
Now, on a state by state basis, we saw two of the most populous states, California and Texas, reporting major drops in unadjusted new claims, those falling last week by 39,000 and 16,000, respectively, although we did really see broad-based declines across the vast majority of states. Now, turning to those continuing claims for the week ended November 21, that's the number of Americans still receiving state benefits, those coming in at an about nine-month low of 5.6 million. That was also better than expected and an improvement from just over 6 million we saw during the previous week.
Now, while this week's jobless claims report was stronger than expected, I do want to caveat that this could be, in part, because of the difficulty in adjusting for seasonality factors around Thanksgiving. So it will be interesting to see where things shake up in next week's report. And then just taking a look at the rest of December, there are some concerns to be watching for.
At the end of this month, we are going to see those federal unemployment benefits authorized under Congress's CARES Act expiring unless another stimulus package gets passed. And those include programs like the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation Program and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program, which together provided benefits for more than 13 million Americans, according to the report that we got out this morning.
And then, also, want to highlight that this report on weekly unemployment claims does come as usual, for each month at least, a day ahead of the Labor Department's monthly jobs report out tomorrow morning. And that is expected to show the smallest number of jobs added back since April's record drop in payrolls at the height of the pandemic. So consensus economists there looking for non-farm payroll gains of 475,000, with an unemployment rate ticking down just slightly to 6.8%. So likely to get another indication of a slowing labor market recovery in tomorrow's report, Akiko and Zack.
AKIKO FUJITA: Yeah, certainly--
ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, and Emily, just as we--
AKIKO FUJITA: --not a good sign, Emily.
ZACK GUZMAN: I just want to point out one thing here, Akiko, before we kind of wrap that, just being that we do always kind of look at state by state recoveries here, as well, which is one of the points highlighted here in the Department of Labor report when we look at unemployment rates in terms of insured unemployment rates. That's the ratio of people on unemployment benefits divided by the labor force. It's the first time that we've seen Hawaii not top the nation in terms of a state by state look since August. California, as we know, has been dealing with a rise in cases there.
Now, the worst uninsured employment rate in the US at 7.3%. As Emily noted, though, that's still vastly better than what we saw earlier in the year when Hawaii was up above 20% in terms of that metric. So I mean, we have seen improvement. But still, Nevada, Alaska, Massachusetts, we talked about Nevada as being one of those economies still tethered to a recovery in their gaming sector and hotels as well. We'll dig into a little bit of what Hawaii is trying to do to boost that later on in the show.
