| Number of Americans applying for jobless claims remains historically low |
The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits held steady at a low level in the seven days to April 27th, the Labor Department reported Thursday, pointing to a still fairly tight labor market that should continue to underpin the economy in the second quarter. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits were unchanged at a seasonally adjusted 208,000, below the 212,000 predicted by economists polled by Reuters. The four-week average of claims, which softens some of the weekly volatility, fell by 3,500 to 210,000, while the total number of claimants, reported with a one week lag, totaled 1.77m. The Labor Department also reported that U.S. productivity rose by an annual 0.3% rate in the first quarter, down from a revised 3.5% gain in the prior three-month period and below the 0.5% expected among economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Unit labor costs, or what a business pays employees to produce one unit of output after taking into account changes in productivity, climbed at a 4.7% annual rate. "Productivity growth wasn't strong enough to significantly mitigate the rise in wages last quarter," said Nationwide Financial Markets Economist Oren Klachkin. "The strong rise in unit labor costs is another in a string of recent data points indicating that inflation pressures remain relatively high."
