Weekly jobless claims are down again in the United States, hitting a new low since the start of the health crisis, despite the Delta variant slowing the recovery, according to data released Thursday by the Department of Labor.
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Between 22 and 28 August, 340,000 people joined the ranks of applicants for unemployment benefit. This is 14,000 less than in the previous week, for which the figures were revised upwards, with 354,000 new registrations. And it’s better than expected, since analysts expected 348,000 new registrations.
Around 750,000 new jobs created in August
The total number of unemployment benefit recipients in the United States, on the other hand, continued to increase, for the second week in a row, to nearly 12.2 million people (+178,526), according to the most recent data available. , also published Thursday. But jobless claims do “say nothing about the pace of hiring, which seems to be paying the price of the Delta variantSays Ian Shepherdson, economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. He even expects the official August employment report, which will be released on Friday, to go in the opposite direction, “with a marked slowdown in private employment growth».
Analysts estimate that 750,000 new jobs were created in August, up from almost a million in July. The unemployment rate is expected to decline further to 5.2% from 5.4% in July. Because the economic recovery in the United States is being slowed down by the Delta variant of Covid-19, which is pushing up contamination cases. Part of the population slowed down certain outings, for fear of contracting the virus and transmitting it and many companies, which had planned to return to the office of executives still largely teleworking in September, postponed it for several months.
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Another fear is that this resurgence of the virus will chop up the first months of the school year, after already a year and a half of school largely at home, in virtual. This would again weigh on the ability of many mothers to return to work. However, the additional unemployment benefits, paid since the start of the pandemic, expire on Monday. The long-term unemployed, as well as the self-employed, among others, will no longer be entitled to it, which could force them to pay less attention to the jobs sought.
Half of the country’s states had taken the lead, and reduced or eliminated this aid for several weeks. However, “we do not expect the end of additional allowances to lead to an immediate increase in employment and in the short term we expect this to weigh more on household income and spending», Warns Nancy Vanden Houten, economist for Oxford Economics, in a note. The Biden administration has also called on states where the unemployment rate remains high to use certain funds paid by the federal government to maintain aid for the unemployed.
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