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On Thursday, data from the US Labour Department had unveiled that the number of Americans filing for state unemployment benefits for the first time on their lives, had fallen marginally last week, reflecting towards a modest demand of labours amid mounting fears of a recession alongside a higher borrowing cost coupled with a robust build-up in price pressures. In point of fact, latest spell of surprising decline in weekly jobless claims came forth just a day after the US Fed had again raised its benchmark borrowing costs by 25-bps (basis percentage points) citing little signs of an ease in a sky-scrapping inflation-surge.
Apart from that, other economic data released earlier in the day had unveiled that US productivity rose by a 3.0 per cent over the fourth quarter of the year, largely driven by an upsurge in demands earlier in the fourth quarter when the 2022 holiday shopping season had begun, while on the flipside of the coin, US labour costs grew by as much as 1.1 per cent last month, comfortably contributing to a havoc-scale inflation-surge.
US weekly initial jobless claims fall
According to data from the US Labour Department, US initial jobless claims fell by 3,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 183,000, marking off the third straight weekly decline in jobless claims, while the number of unadjusted jobless claims, which is usually contemplated as a more reliable indicator to US labour market, remained almost unchanged at 224,356 clams last week.
Besides, continuing jobless claims dipped by 11,000 to 1.655 million. Meanwhile, addressing that the US labour market had yet to show signs of weaknesses in the face of an aggressive rate-hike cycle adopted by the US Federal Reserve, a Chief US economist at High Frequency Economics in White Plains, New York, Rubeela Farooqi said, “The labor market has yet to respond meaningfully to a rapid increase in interest rates”.