(AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week rose to the highest level in more than eight months in what may be a sign that the labor market is weakening.
Applications for jobless aid for the week ending July 16 rose by 7,000 to 251,000, up from the previous week’s 244,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s the most since Nov. 13, 2021 when 265,000 Americans applied for benefits.
Analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet expected the number to come in at 242,000.
First-time applications generally reflect layoffs.
The four-week average for claims, which smooths out some of the week-to-week volatility, rose by 4,500 from the previous week, to 240,500.
The total number of Americans collecting jobless benefits for the week ending July 9 rose by 51,000 from the previous week, to 1,384,000. That figure has been near 50-year lows for months. …
Earlier this month, the Labor Department reported that employers added 372,000 jobs in June, a surprisingly robust gain and similar to the pace of the previous two months. Economists had expected job growth to slow sharply last month given the broader signs of economic weakness.
The unemployment rate remained 3.6 percent for a fourth straight month, matching a near-50-year low that was reached before the pandemic struck in early 2020.
The government also reported earlier in July that US employers advertised fewer jobs in May amid signs that the economy is weakening, though the overall demand for workers remained strong. There are nearly two job openings for every unemployed person.
Consumer prices are still soaring, up 9.1 percent in June compared with a year earlier, the biggest yearly increase since 1981, the government reported last week. …
The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week hit its highest level in nearly 8 months, but the total number of those collecting benefits fell. The Labor Department also reported last week that inflation at the wholesale level climbed 11.3 percent in June from a year earlier.
All of those figures paint a divergent picture of the post-pandemic economy: Inflation is hammering household budgets, forcing consumers to pull back on spending, and growth is weakening, heightening fears the economy could fall into recession.
In an effort to combat the worst inflation in more than four decades, the Federal Reserve raised rates by a half-point in May and another rare three-quarter point increase last month. Most economists expect the Federal Reserve to jack up its borrowing rate another half-to-three-quarters of a point when it meets later this month.
Though the labor market is still strong, there have been some high-profile layoffs announced recently by Tesla, Netflix, Carvana, Redfin, and Coinbase.
A semi-c’est la vie. We are trying to do something a bit different. There is so much stuff out there we do not see or see and could write about. We can offer it up in an abbreviated form. As you probably noticed, I get tons of healthcare stuff which I can not examine deeply but it can be of interest to readers. So I list it with a few blurbs.
I certainly have no problem with links with some sort of teaser paragraph or so when they are accompanied by actual comments by the poster(as you do all the time. It’s just the constant cut and paste with no comment at all that drives me crazy.
There’s a good chance the US Commerce Department will report Thursday that the economy shrank from April through June, a second-straight quarterly contraction that by a conventional rule of thumb would mean the nation is in a recession.
But it’s not officially a recession until a small group of experts empaneled by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridgesays so — and they are known to take their time.
The private organization that the federal government has empowered to designate recessions is headquartered in a nondescript office building betweenHarvard and Central squares, with a parking lot next to Hubba Hubba, a self-proclaimed “sex positive” boutique. Outside economists describe its workings as mysterious, and the long wait for its recession pronouncements can be like watching for the white smoke heralding a new pope. …
… One word for it is “endemic,” says Trevor Bedford, a computational virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and among the most careful and dependable soothsayers of the past two years.
Bedford is reluctant to dwell on semantic debates about what constitutes a “pandemic phase” rather than an “endemic phase” for Covid-19, for instance. But if we insist that the country is still in a pandemic phase, he says, we’re not going to be able to downshift from that anytime soon, since conditions aren’t likely to look very different for years — and the country’s accumulating immunological protection, if imperfect, is still a categorical break from those earlier phases in which we first calibrated our fears. “If we’re saying that we’re still in a pandemic right now, it’s still going to be a pandemic in year seven — we’ll still be in a pandemic then,” Bedford says. “So I think it’s better to acknowledge that we’re at 98 percent of the population having immunity of some form — certainly over 95 percent. There’s not much more that could change in that regard.”
There are technical reasons other epidemiologists would dispute the term “endemic.” With respiratory diseases, it can refer to diseases where the average sick person infects fewer than one new person, and each of this year’s variants is more infectious than that. And while many use “endemic” to imply viral stability, there remains the possibility of a “surprise” in viral evolution, of course; no one I spoke to for this article was comfortable ruling it out. …
Right now, Bedford says, around 5 percent of the country is getting infected with the coronavirus each month and he expects that pattern to largely continue. What would that imply death-wise, I ask? As a ballpark estimate, he says, going forward we can expect that every year, around 50 percent of Americans will be infected and more than 100,000 will die. …
Desensitization is an amazing thing. At this point most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes.
What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in blue America.
Urban elites are constantly accused of not understanding Real America™. And, to be fair, most big-city residents probably don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural areas and small towns, although it’s doubtful whether this gap justified the immense number of news reports interviewing Trump voters sitting in diners. …
But I’d argue that right-wing misperceptions of blue America run far deeper — and are far more dangerous.
Let’s start with the politics. The other day The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, reporting from the campaign trail, noted that many Republican candidates are claiming that Democrats are deliberately undermining the nation and promoting violence against their opponents; some are even claiming that we’re already in a civil war.
Some (many?) of these candidates have been winning primaries, suggesting that the G.O.P. base agrees with them. Actually, I’d like to see some surveys along the lines of those showing that most Republicans accept the Big Lie. How many Republicans believe that President Biden and other leading Democrats are left-wing radicals, indeed Marxists?
Relatedly, I’d like to know how many Republicans believe that Black Lives Matter demonstrators looted and burned large parts of America’s major cities.
Now, the reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a mildly center-left coalition, consisting of what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative ones at that. To take one measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats — actually, any Democratic members of Congress — who have expressed admiration for any authoritarian foreign regime. …
This is in contrast to widespread conservative admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who recently denounced other Europeans for “mixing with non-Europeans” and declared that he doesn’t want Hungary to become a “mixed-race” country.
On the domestic violence front, a study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of extremist-related domestic killings from 2012 to 2021 were perpetrated by the right and only 4 percent by the left.
Finally, about B.L.M.: The protests were, in fact, overwhelmingly peaceful. Yes, there was some arson and looting, with total property damage typically estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion. That may sound like a lot, but America is a big country, so it needs to be put in perspective.
Here’s one point of comparison. Back in April, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, pulled a political stunt at the border with Mexico, temporarily imposing extra security checks that caused a major slowdown of traffic, disrupting business and leading to a lot of spoiled produce. Total economic losses have been estimated at around $4 billion; that is, a few days of border-security theater appear to have caused more economic damage than a hundred days of mass protests.
Yet pointing out these facts probably won’t change many minds. Nor does there seem to be any way to change the perception, also alluded to in that Post article, that a lax attitude toward law enforcement has turned America’s big cities into dangerous hellholes. It’s true that violent crime rose during the pandemic, but it rose about as much in rural America as it did in urban areas. And despite that recent rise, violence in many cities is far lower than it was not long ago.
In New York City, homicides so far this year are running a bit below their 2021 level, and in 2021 they were 78 percent lower than they were in 1990 and a quarter lower than they were in 2001. As Bloomberg’s Justin Fox has documented, New York is actually a lot safer than small-town America. Los Angeles has also seen a big long-term drop in homicides, as has California as a whole. Some cities, notably Philadelphia and Chicago, are back to or above early 1990s murder rates, but they’re not representative of the broader picture.
But who among the Republican base will acknowledge this reality? Whenever I mention New York’s relative safety, I get a wave of mail saying, in effect, “You can’t really believe that.”
The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.
Americans filing jobless claims at highest level in 8 months
Boston Globe – July 22
Gee Fred:
Exactly what NDd wrote (not that you copied it) yesterday and we posted today. Do you believe wages are the issue here?
I suspect that job insecurity, price increases and shortages are the issues mostly. If unemployment benefits are available, why not take them?
But, are prices going up because wages are also? Hmmm.
Christ sakes.
EM
What is wrong?
Fred taking his position as Angry Bear’s chyron again.
EM:
A semi-c’est la vie. We are trying to do something a bit different. There is so much stuff out there we do not see or see and could write about. We can offer it up in an abbreviated form. As you probably noticed, I get tons of healthcare stuff which I can not examine deeply but it can be of interest to readers. So I list it with a few blurbs.
That is the thought anyway.
I certainly have no problem with links with some sort of teaser paragraph or so when they are accompanied by actual comments by the poster(as you do all the time. It’s just the constant cut and paste with no comment at all that drives me crazy.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to scroll through material you don’t want to read.
I do it all the time.
Cob,
SS post on Lawyers, Guns and Money. I tried my best for you. Sad how few understand or even try to understand.
It’s not officially a recession until this Cambridge-based group says so
Boston Globe – July 23
A lengthy article about covid in the US, and what the future (‘endemic covid’) may be like.
Endemic Covid-19 Looks Pretty Brutal
NY Times – July 20
FYI…
Recent journal articles by Trevor Bedford
Is it better to post this at the bottom of a stale thread
Or to post it where it might piss somebody off
than to not post it at all?
The Dystopian Myths of Red America
NY Times – Paul Krugman – July 25