from Fox Business:
Job hunters aren’t likely to find much to be excited about in the latest report on weekly unemployment claims, which came in worse than expected.
The Labor Department said Thursday that initial claims in the week ending Jan. 23 dropped 8,000 to 470,000, while Wall Street was looking for a pullback of closer to 32,000.
Claims in the previous week were revised to show an increase of 34,000, versus the previously reported 36,000.
The number of people getting state jobless benefits fell by 57,000 to 4.
A new wave of selling slammed the markets on Thursday, pushing the Dow down more than 100 points and dragging the Nasdaq Composite almost 2% lower, as the markets react negatively to tumbling tech stocks, the latest earnings reports and disappointing jobs data.
Bloomberg:
Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Orders for capital goods rose in December, and more Americans than anticipated filed claims for unemployment benefits last week, indicating business investment is making a comeback while the job market stagnates.
Bookings for durable goods excluding transportation equipment climbed 0.9 percent last month, exceeding the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. Initial jobless applications fell to 470,000 in the week ended Jan. 23 from 478,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.
“It’s encouraging, but we haven’t put all the pieces together for a robust recovery,” said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies & Co. in New York. The figures are “consistent with a moderate rate of investment spending, but we still have a very weak labor market. We will make slow, steady progress in the months ahead.”
Companies such as Intel Corp. will probably keep churning out more goods to stop inventories from falling further, pointing to gains in investment that Federal Reserve policy makers yesterday said were contributing to the economic recovery. The Fed also said that while consumer spending is expanding, it is in part “constrained by a weak labor market,” underscoring the need to maintain low interest rates.
Stocks fell, led by technology shares, after Qualcomm Inc. lowered its sales outlook because of a “subdued” economic recovery in developed regions, including Europe and Japan. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index dropped 1.1 percent to 1,085.95 at 11:11 a.m. in New York.
