It's Jobless Thursday!

And we have the lowest number of initial unemployment claims in 54 years.

This is a weird economy:

New applications for U.S. unemployment benefits fell last week to a near 54-year low as employers held on to workers in a tight labor market.

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell to 166,000 during the week that ended on April 2, compared with a revised 171,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said Thursday. The weekly total was the lowest since November 1968, when the labor force was less than half of its current size.

………

The four-week average for claims, which smooths out volatility, fell to 170,000. The Labor Department changed its methodology for computing seasonal adjustments, which contributed to some of the revisions in the report. This change happens annually.

………

Continuing claims, a proxy for the total number of people receiving payments from state unemployment programs, moved slightly up to 1,523,000 for the week ended March 26 from the previous week’s revised total. Continuing claims are reported with a one-week lag.

There were around 1.8 job openings for every unemployed worker in February, according to the Labor Department’s most recent data.

I still think that the seasonal adjustments are screwed up, because there have been some seismic changes in the workforce, which likely includes a million or so people in the US suffering from long Covid.