Initial Jobless Claims
reached a long-awaited milestone this morning, recording last week’s new claims total sub-700K in the entire pandemic era: 684K. This is also a very strong 97K fewer initial claims than the previous week’s upwardly revised 781K, making it even more impressive. Further, this morning’s read notches a whole new level lower, as the previous low of this period was 711K, back in November.
Continuing Claims
reached a milestone of its own, going sub-4 million for the first time since the affects of the coronavirus on the American economy manifested themselves: 3.87 million, a healthy shedding of 260K longer-term jobless claims from the previous week. As mentioned in this space before, however, Continuing Claims have not given as accurate a read of the long-term unemployed since Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) has absorbed a sizable portion of the unemployed.
Next week, we’ll be back to the monthly jobs data, both on the private-sector side with
ADP
ADP
Wednesday and overall non-farm payrolls from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday. Last month provided a surprise to the positive, bringing in nearly 380K new jobs (most in the Leisure & Hospitality sector) and the Unemployment Rate down to 6.2%. Will the month of March push these numbers to the same extent? Today’s weekly claims figures suggest they may.
The final revision on
U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
for Q4 also came out before this morning’s opening bell, gaining 20 basis points from the first two reads, to +4.3%. After record-setting Q2 and Q3 2020 GDP headlines, this is a welcome sight. We can also expect these figures to continue going higher — already economists are looking for +6.5% growth for full-year 2021.
Pre-market futures this morning continue to wallow in the mire, however: the Dow looks to open -130 points, the S&P 500 -20 and the Nasdaq continues its pronounced downward slide, -90 points. The tech-heavy index is about to go negative for the year to date, while the Dow still enjoys 5%+ growth and the S&P remains up around 3%. We’re also seeing crude oil prices taking a break, and Bitcoin selling off in early trading. We don’t expect any of this is for the long term.
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