WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits increased marginally last week amid relatively low layoffs, despite \u200cthe dragging war with Iran.<\/p>\n
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose \u200c5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 215,000 for the week ended May 23, the Labor Department said \u200bon Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 211,000 claims for the latest week. Claims have been tucked in a 190,000-230,000 range this year.<\/p>\n
Outside high-profile job cuts by technology firms related to artificial intelligence, layoffs have remained generally low, despite \u200cuncertainty, first from last year’s \u2060sweeping import tariffs and now the U.S-Israel war with Iran. The conflict has shut off the Strait of Hormuz, boosting \u2060commodity prices, including oil and fertilizers, and driving up inflation.<\/p>\n
The number of people receiving unemployment benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased \u200b15,000 to \u200ba seasonally adjusted 1.786 million during the \u200bweek ended May 16, the \u200cclaims report showed. The so-called continuing claims covered the period during which the government surveyed households for May’s unemployment rate.<\/p>\n
The unemployment rate is expected to have held steady at 4.3% in May. Continuing claims have dropped from last year’s lofty levels, though some of the decline is likely due to people exhausting \u200ctheir eligibility for benefits, limited to 26 \u200bweeks in most states.<\/p>\n
They also do not capture \u200byoung unemployed Americans, who typically \u200bhave no or a limited work history, disqualifying them from \u200cbenefits. College graduates are entering a \u200btough labor market. Some \u200bof last year’s graduates remain unemployed.<\/p>\n
A Conference Board survey on Tuesday showed households’ perceptions of the labor market were mixed this month, with \u200bthe share viewing jobs \u200cas “plentiful” falling to the lowest level since February 2021. But the share \u200breporting that jobs were “hard to get” hit a seven-month low.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing claims for unemployment benefits increased marginally last week…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101,67325,23258,293007,740,2457,229338],"class_list":["post-671580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-initial-claims","tag-labor-department","tag-unemployed-americans","tag-unemployment-benefits","tag-unemployment-rate","tag-war-with-iran"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}