US jobless claims fall again as labor market continues to flash strength

abcnews.go.com:

Fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as the labor market continues to show fortitude in the face of higher interest rates

Fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week with the labor market continuing to cruise along despite higher interest rates intended to cool hiring.

U.S. applications for jobless claims fell by 9,000 to 228,000 for the week ending July 15, from 237,000 previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The four-week moving average of claims, which evens out some of the weekly volatility, fell by 9,250 to 237,500.

Jobless claim applications are viewed as reflective of the number of layoffs in a given week.

For three weeks in late May and early June, jobless claims had appeared to reach a sustained, higher level, above 260,000. But the past four weeks, claims have retreated and the labor market remains historically healthy.

Since more than 20 million jobs vanished when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, U.S. employers have added jobs at a blistering pace, more often than not beating forecasts. Despite the fastest interest rate hikes since 1989, the unemployment rate has hardly budged and remains historically low at 3.6%.

Fed officials have said that the unemployment rate needs to rise well past 4% to bring inflation down, but a report last week showed that consumer prices fell to their lowest level since early 2021 — 3% in June compared with a year earlier — and much closer to the Fed’s target of 2%.

The U.S. economy has broadly been resilient in the face of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in its effort to extinguish persistent inflation not seen since the early 1980s.

The U.S. economy grew at a 2% annual pace from January