First-time jobless claims continued to show modest improvement with the top-line figure arriving at 751,000 for the week ending Oct. 31. That is down 7,000 from the previous week’s revised level of 758,000, according to Labor Department data released on Thursday. After adding in the 382,883 people who filed for first-time Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the total of first-time filers rose to 1.13 million.
As people exhaust their eligibility for jobless benefits, the total number on some form of unemployment insurance declined to 21.5 million. Among those are 7.4 million people receiving regular state benefits, 9.3 million on the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and 3.9 million on the federal Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program.
It is becoming increasingly clear that there will need to be another round of fiscal aid to support the millions of displaced workers who are not going to be recalled back to work anytime soon as the specter of the second wave of the pandemic grows. Continuing claims declined by 538,000 to 7.28 million, which implies an insured unemployment rate of 5%.
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