CNN: “Another 1 million American workers filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The report met economists’ expectations, and was a small decline from the prior week, but the report was still somewhat of a disappointment. So far, we’ve only seen one week — at the start of August — with fewer than a million claims since March, when the pandemic started to take its toll on America’s job market.”
“Continued jobless claims, which count people filing at least two weeks in a row, stood at 14.5 million on a seasonally adjusted basis. Without the seasonal adjustments, which smooth out the data in normal times but are a distortion during the pandemic, the picture looks slightly different but not necessarily better: initial unadjusted claims stood at 821,591 last week. But, on top of that, 607,806 Americans — more than in the prior week — filed claims for pandemic unemployment assistance, one of the programs Congress devised to help workers who don’t have access to the regular government programs, such as the self-employed. That brings the total of unadjusted first-time claims to 1.4 million.”