Unemployment filings hit a 55-year low

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Kai Rizdal** (1:32)
In exactly this order, the labor market, the bond market, the healthcare market, and the AI market. But we're going to make it interesting.
From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.
In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdal. It is Thursday today, 23 July. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We begin today with an exercise familiar to anyone who deals with a lot of economic data, an exercise that can fairly be summarized as, huh, what do you suppose that means? The proximate cause was today's update on first-time claims for unemployment benefits. They fell by 22,000 to the lowest absolute level they have been since literally 1969, when obviously the labor force was far, far smaller. So, huh, what do you suppose that means? Well, it could be a sign of a strong labor market with layoffs extra low and those who do get laid off finding new jobs so quickly, and barely have time to apply for unemployment, or it could be something else. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman gets us going.

**Mitchell Hartman** (2:51)
It used to be that first-time jobless claims provided a pretty good snapshot of the labor market.

**Michelle Evermore** (2:57)
But says Michelle Evermore at the National Employment Law Project, Initial claims data is no longer a very reliable economic indicator.

**Mitchell Hartman** (3:06)
She says fewer people who get laid off are applying for unemployment insurance. Many states now offer less than 26 weeks of benefits, eligibility has been tightened, and unemployment checks are anemic.

**Michelle Evermore** (3:18)
It replaces so little of prior income. People are better off taking some sort of terrible gig jobs than they are collecting unemployment.

**Mitchell Hartman** (3:27)
Fewer than one in three unemployed people are even eligible says University of Michigan economist Betsy Stevenson, meaning low and falling jobless claims.

**Betsy Stevenson** (3:37)
Doesn't mean we have a robust and healthy labor market. She says it is pretty good if you have a job and can keep it, but a low hire, low fire environment is particularly hard for people to enter or reenter the labor market.

**Mitchell Hartman** (3:53)
Meanwhile, the percentage of people who've been job searching for six months or longer is up sharply over the past year. Economist Daniel Jow at jobsite Glassdoor says these workers are much less likely to reject any job offers they get.

**Greg Ip** (4:08)
They feel like they don't really have options.

**Mitchell Hartman** (4:11)
Younger, less experienced workers are also facing big challenges, says economist Sneha Puri at the Indeed Hiring Lab. While senior level job postings are up 15 percent year over year, they're actually down 6.3 percent for entry-level roles. At the same time, more experienced workers are applying for those entry-level positions, increasing the competition for recent high school and college grads.
I'm Mitchell Hartman for Marketplace.

**Kai Rizdal** (4:38)
On Wall Street today, I mean, traders looked around and saw the war and all the AI spending and decided they were not having it. We will have the details, though, when we do the numbers.
We spent some time yesterday talking about the bond market. We're going to do it again, but different, because of what Greg Ip wrote in the Wall Street Journal the other day, a piece headlined, How Sky-High Deficits Threaten the Bond Market. Greg, it's good to have you on.