Having surged back above 20 million people, analysts expected a drop in the number of Americans claiming some form of unemployment benefit in the last week, but instead, the number of Americans filing jobless claims for first time surged back up to 861k (considerably worse than the 773k expected). Worse still, the prior week’s improvement to 793k was drastically revised higher to 848k…
Source: Bloomberg
California and Illinois were the biggest drivers of the surge in claims while Texas saw jobless claims drop…
One potential silver lining is that the total number of jobless benefits claimants did decline last week…
Source: Bloomberg
Still over 18 million Americans on the ‘dole’ is not a pretty picture… as the economies of the nation open up.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 02/18/2021 – 08:38