Applications for unemployment benefits for the week ending Aug. 9 fell by 3,000 to 224,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s below the 230,000 new applications that economists had forecast.
Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as a proxy for U.S. layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since COVID-19 throttled the economy in the spring of 2020.
Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported Thursday that its producer price index — which measures inflation before it hits consumers — was up 0.9% last month from June and 3,3% from a year earlier.
The numbers were much higher than economists had expected.
The wholesale inflation report two days after the Labor Department reported that consumer prices rose 2.7% last month from July 2024, same as the previous month and up from a post-pandemic low of 2.3% in April. Core consumer prices rose 3.1%, up from 2.9% in June. Both figures are above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
The new numbers suggest that slowing rent increases and cheaper gas are at least partly offsetting the impacts of Trump’s tariffs.
