More Good Economic News: Jobless Claims Fall to Four-Year Low

We had some more positive economic news. Or at least, a lack of terrible economic news. The Labor Department reported that first-time claims for unemployment benefits dropped to a seasonally adjusted 348,000. That’s the lowest number in four years. To give you some perspective, in 2009 jobless claims soared well over 600,000 a few times. Wall Street economists were expecting today’s report to be 365,000, so we’re running a little ahead of expectations. This is more evidence that the jobs market is slowly getting better.

The other good news is that wholesale prices rose by just 0.1% in January. Economists were expecting an increase of 0.4%. Wholesales prices actually fell by 0.1% in December. The takeaway is that inflation still isn’t a major problem for wholesalers. Typically, inflation shows up here first.

Still, we can’t say that there’s no threat of inflation down the road. Today’s report showed that the “core rate,” which excludes food and energy, rose by 0.4%. Economists like to look at the core rate because food and energy prices can be very volatile.

Posted by on February 16th, 2012 at 9:52 am


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