WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. applications for unemployment benefits fell last week, remaining in the same range of recent years despite a broadly tepid labor market.
The number of Americans filing for jobless aid for the week ending March 14 fell by 8,000 from the previous week to 205,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s fewer than the 215,000 new filings analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet were expecting.
Filings for unemployment benefits
are viewed as a proxy for U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.
While weekly layoffs have remained in a healthy range mostly between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years, a number of high-profile companies have announced job cuts recently, including Morgan Stanley,Block, UPSand Amazon.
Earlier this month, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers unexpectedly cut 92,000 jobs in February, a sign that the labor market remains under strain. Revisions also slashed 69,000 jobs from December and January payrolls, nudging the unemployment rate up to 4.4%.
The surprisingly weak employment picture in February adds to the economic uncertainty over the war with Iran, which has caused oil prices to surge more than 40% and saddled business and consumers with higher costs.
This comes at a time when inflation was already relatively high in the U.S.
Last week, the Commerce Department reported that the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, personal consumption expenditures or PCE, rose 2.8% in January compared with a year earlier. That’s above the Fed’s 2% target and the latest sign that prices were persistently elevated even before the Iran war caused spikes in oil and gas costs.
That persistent inflation, combined with the uncertainties brought on by the conflict in the Middle East, led the Fed to leave its benchmark lending rate alone on Wednesday.
“The thing I really want to emphasize is, nobody knows,” Powell said, referring to the impact of the Iran war. “The economic effects could be bigger, they could be smaller, they could be much smaller, they could be much bigger. We just don’t know.”
Powell said the central bank would need to see further progress in the price of goods declining as the impact of tariffs fades before cutting rates further. Lower interest rates tend to provide fuel for inflation.
For now, the U.S. job market appears stuck in what economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” state that has kept the unemployment rate historically low, but has left those out of work struggling to find a new job.
Data over the past year has broadly revealed a labor market in which hiring has clearly slowed, hobbled by uncertainty stoked by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to tamp down a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.
The Labor Department’s report Thursday showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which softens some of the week-to-week volatility, dipped by 750 to 210,750.
The total number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the previous week ending March 7 rose by 10,000 to 1.86 million, the government said.
