The U.S labor market continues to tighten. Recent employment reports have remained upbeat – the unemployment rate remains low – and a relatively small fraction of Americans is being separated from their current position. During a week in late December, initial claims for unemployment benefits fell below two hundred and seventy thousand nationally.
Claims have been below the three hundred thousand threshold for more than forty weeks – the longest stretch since the early nineteen seventies when the U.S. labor market was much smaller. The point is that job security has seldom been better in America is recent decades despite a number of recent high profile layoffs, including one recently announced by DuPont.
The same report indicated that the number of people receiving unemployment benefits declined to two point two million. With the U.S. economy still expanding and given ongoing job creation, many of those who are presently unemployed and receiving benefits could be employed by some point this year.
That will help support consumer spending growth and suggests that the current year is poised to be another year of recovery in America absent a major geopolitical event, a stock market crash, or some other unforeseeable set of circumstances.
