While the Labor Department released a report Thursday morning showing a modest decrease in first-time claims for unemployment benefits in the week ended March 6th, the report also showed an increase in continuing claims.
The report showed that initial jobless claims edged down to 462,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 468,000. Economists had expected jobless claims to slip to 460,000 from the 469,000 originally reported for the previous week.
Peter Boockvar, equity strategist for Miller Tabak, said, "Due to the noise around the snow storms, it's best to look at the 4-week average, which smoothes out the data."
The less volatile four-week moving average rose to 475,500 from the previous week's revised average of 470,500. With the increase, the moving average reached its highest level since late November of 2009.
Additionally, the Labor Department said that continuing claims, a reading on the number of people receiving ongoing unemployment help, rose to 4.558 million in the week ended February 27th from the preceding week's revised level of 4.521 million.
With the increase, continuing claims bounced off the more than one-year low set in the previous week, which was the lowest level since claims came in at 4.487 million in the week ended January 3rd, 2009.
On the other hand, the report also showed that those receiving emergency unemployment compensation fell by almost 160 thousand in the week ended February 20th to 5.528 million. Those receiving extended benefits also fell by about 15 thousand in the week.
Boockvar said, "We hope this category begins to fall due to recipients finding new jobs rather than from exhaustion of benefits, but the hiring outlook still remains uncertain."
Last Friday, the Labor Department released a report showing that payroll employment showed a relatively modest decrease in the month of February, despite the impact of severe winter weather.
The report showed that non-farm payroll employment fell by 36,000 jobs in February following a revised decrease of 26,000 jobs in January. Economists had expected a more substantial loss of about 68,000 jobs compared to the loss of 20,000 jobs originally reported for the previous month.
While the Labor Department acknowledged that the data was impacted by the severe snowstorms in early February, it said it is not possible to precisely quantify the net impact of the storms.
The Labor Department also said that the unemployment rate in February remained unchanged from the previous month at 9.7 percent. The unemployment rate had been expected to tick up to 9.8 percent.
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