Skip to content
Customize Consent Preferences

We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.

The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ... 

Always Active

Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.

No cookies to display.

Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.

No cookies to display.

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

No cookies to display.

Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.

No cookies to display.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.

No cookies to display.

NEW JOBLESS CLAIMS EDGE UP ABOVE 400,000

In the most recent week, 412,000 new claims for unemployment benefits were filed, the U.S. labor department reported, breaking a six-week streak of steady declines and missing the median estimate of 370,000 among economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Continuing claims rose to 3.52 million, also failing to meet economists’ estimate, which had called for 3.43 million ongoing claims.
Although new claims for jobless payments have been trending down, continuing claims have shown no such tendency; seven million more Americans are jobless now than before the 2020 crisis.
Fear of catching the COVID virus, generous federal unemployment benefits, a lack of affordable child care, and a mismatch between workers and needed skills are keeping workers out of the labor force, U.S. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said in a 16 June press conference quoted by Business Insider.
Those factors are likely to diminish through the summer, Powell predicted.
“I would expect that we would see strong job creation building up over the summer and going into the fall,” he said.
TRENDPOST: Powell is obligated to sound optimistic; we are obligated to be realistic.
Airlines say that business travel will not resume in a meaningful way until late this year; many corporations have decided that Zoom is as effective as junketing executives spending company money on hotels and plane tickets. That means that hotels, as well as nearby restaurants, night spots, and other dependent businesses, can permanently dispense with a portion of their workforce.
Restaurants are having trouble finding workers, in part because “people working in hospitality went home and…reassessed their lives,” Berlin restaurateur Emily Harmon said in our 1 June, 2021 story “Europe’s Hospitality Industry Starved for Workers,” and decided they no longer wanted to work long hours for poor pay.
Retailers have shuttered stores by the thousands as the economic shutdown persuaded shoppers of the convenience of buying everything from groceries to lawn mowers online.
The economic shutdown has made permanent changes to the economy that have forever reduced the number of workers needed in service jobs. These workers typically lack the skills to upgrade to higher-paying work. As a result, unemployment among these millions of low-skill workers will become chronic.

Comments are closed.