News
Bloomberg | Jobless Claims Drop Affirms U.S. Labor Market Progress: Economy
Jobless claims plunged by 42,000 to 346,000 in the week ended April 6 from a revised 388,000, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Consumer confidence was little changed last week as gains for top earners helped overcome growing pessimism at the other end of the income scale, another report showed.
Econ Comments & Analysis
Barrons | No Workers' Paradise
Rarely has the cliché rung as true as with the latest report that showed the nation's jobless rate fell 0.1 of a percentage point last month, to 7.6%—even though fewer people had jobs and more were unemployed. The improvement, if you can call it that, was the result of nearly half a million folks dropping out of the labor force and the smallest percentage of the working-age population in the workforce in a generation.
