New Jobless Numbers Show US Unemployment Down As Lockdowns Loom

Though new cases of COVID-19 risk shutting down parts of the U.S. economy, jobless claims for the week ending Nov. 7 were an improvement from the previous week.

The U.S. Labor Department on Thursday reported initial jobless claims through Saturday were 709,000. That’s 48,000 less than the previous week’s level, which was revised upward to 757,000.

The four-week moving average was 755,250, some 32,250 lower than the previous figure. The unemployment rate is at 4.6% for the week ending Oct. 31, the latest date for data compiled by the Labor Department.

State officials are mulling what to do to control a pandemic that shows no immediate signs of letting up. Drugmaker Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech announced this week they were seeking fast-track approval for a vaccine from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

If approved, the vaccine would not be available until first quarter 2021 at the earliest. However, some people are planning ahead, which could be supportive of more hirings.

“Households and firms are going to plan ahead, for example by booking travel, vacation, and capex [capital expenditures], and the implication is that we will immediately begin to see the positive effects on employment, GDP, and earnings, even before the vaccine is available to the public,” Torsten Slok, a chief economist for Apollo Global Management, was quoted by Yahoo! news as saying.

On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed hiring figures are close to where they were before the pandemic. However, Elise Gold, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told NBC News the labor situation still looks bleak, despite steady gains over the last 11 weeks.

"For every 18 workers who were officially counted as unemployed, there were only available jobs for 10 of them,” she said. “That means, no matter what they did, there were no jobs for 5.4 million unemployed workers."

Weekly jobless claims for 2019 routinely came in below 200,000.