The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 343,000 last week, a sign that layoffs remain low and companies are adding a modest number of jobs.
The four-week average, a less volatile figure, dipped just 750 to 345,500, the Labor Department said Wednesday. The average has fallen 9 percent in the past year.
Weekly applications for unemployment benefits are a proxy for layoffs. Since March, they have fluctuated roughly between 340,000 and 360,000, a level consistent with steady hiring.
On Friday, the government will issue its June jobs report. Economists forecast that it will show employers added 165,000 jobs, slightly below the 175,000 gain in May. The unemployment rate likely ticked down to 7.5 percent from 7.6 percent. The economy has added an average of about 175,000 jobs per month for the last two years.
In a separate report, payroll provider ADP said that businesses added 188,000 jobs in June, up from 134,000 in May and the most since February. That's a hopeful sign hiring is picking up a bit.
More hiring could help the economy grow faster later this year. The economy expanded at only a 1.8 percent annual rate in the January-March quarter. Most analysts think it grew at a similarly tepid annual pace between 1.5 percent and 2 percent in the April-June period.
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Two reports this week suggested that manufacturers are receiving more orders and are likely producing more but aren't necessarily hiring more workers.
A survey by the Institute for Supply Management showed that manufacturing activity expanded in June after shrinking in May. Measures of new orders and production rose.
But a gauge of hiring fell, indicating that factories cut jobs for a fourth straight month.
A separate report from the Commerce Department said U.S. factories fielded more orders for computers, machinery and other goods in May.
Other recent economic reports have been encouraging. Home prices are rising at a healthy pace, signaling a steady housing recovery. That trend should help boost construction jobs.
Spending at retail businesses rose in May, a sign that solid job growth has encouraged Americans to open their wallets. And the improving job market has lifted consumer confidence to its highest point in 5 1/2 years.
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER
AP Economics Writer
(AP:WASHINGTON)
Claims for unemployment benefits fall again!! Does the mean QE tapering is fast approaching. Hey checkout this graph http://usat.ly/1207JQT, it’s hard to draw a direction about the number of new claims for jobless benefits. Oh wait, guess I found a pattern there, it’s a rollercoaster track lol…..
JP, it's time you grew up and realized the Founding Fathers never intended plutocracy but were starting to worry about it, as this time-ordered list of quotes shows, as well as that the moneyed few have long exploited the passions of ignoramuses against their own interests, often to the nation's detriment.
"... the ultimate goal of a business is not to make a profit. Profit is just the means. The goal is the general welfare." - Adam Smith (1723-90), considered by many to be the father of our capitalist system - "The directors of such (joint-stock) companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
"...Neither body to jail nor soul to damn." - Lord Edward Thurlow (1731-1806) describing a new British invention, the corporation. One might add, "nor conscience to pique, nor death to ponder."
"Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind." - John Adams
"There is...an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy." - Thomas Jefferson
"Ignorant, restless desperadoes, without conscience or principles, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievances which have no existence but in their own imaginations." - Abigail Adams
"Prejudice is the child of ignorance." - William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid ..., it is true that most stupid people are conservative." - John Stewart Mill (1806-1873) "I never meant to say that the conservatives are ... stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." and "There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."
"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led." - Edgar Allen Poe
"You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - P. T. Barnum (1810-91)
"It is the weakness and danger of republics that the vices as well as virtues of the people are represented in their legislation." - Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85)
"TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY.(title of a section in his book, Democracy in America, Volume I, Chapter XV, 1835) ... In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them." - Alexis de Tocqueville
"(Jefferson's) ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition." Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens, Savannah, March 21, 1861.
"Fear is the parent of cruelty." - James Anthony Froude (1818-94)
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
"Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause." - Victor Hugo
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."- Abraham Lincoln
"The great mistake of my life was taking a military education." - Robert E Lee
"Let them eat grass." - Andrew Myrick, a white trader to the starving Sioux, at a meeting of US Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, Indians and traders, in August 1862. Afterward Myrick was found dead with grass in his mouth.
"Come, come my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles and see that the world is moving." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"The Commission is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, while at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal." - Richard Olney, railroad attorney and US Attorney General, circa 1889, re the first US regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission.
"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them." - William Jennings Bryan, 1896
"To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." - Theodore Roosevelt, 1912
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." - Smedley Butler, highest ranking, most decorated U.S. Marine, two Congressional Medals of Honor, 1914, 1917, Distinguished Service Medal, 1919. Republican candidate for Senate, 1932.
"Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference." - Franklin D Roosevelt, 1936, and "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." 1942
"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells." - John T. Flynn (1882-1964, American writer), 1944
"The people don't want war, but" they "can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." - Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials
"Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many... The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of their inadequacy and impotence. They hate not wickedness but weakness. When it is in their power to do so, the weak destroy (what they perceive to be) weakness wherever they see it." - Eric Hoffer - "It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil... attracts the weak."
"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security." and "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
"If you can't eat their (lobbyists') food, drink their booze, screw their women and still vote against them, you have no business being up here." - Jesse Unruh (defeated by Reagan for Gov of CA) - "Money is the mother's milk of politics." 1966
"The less care they give them, the more money they make." - John Ehrlichman, describing Kaiser Permanente to Pres. Nixon, who replied "Fine." - White House tapes, 2/17/71. Kaiser was a lavish supporter of Nixon's campaigns.
"Follow the money. Always follow the money." - Deep Throat
"Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public (corporate) manipulation." - Marshall McLuhan (1911-80)
"The long-term political effects of a successful... health care bill will be even worse — much worse... It will revive the reputation of... Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class..." - William Kristol memo, "Defeating President Clinton's Healthcare Proposal" 12/93.
"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." - Alex Carey, Australian social scientist, 1995
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon
"The greatest threat to democracy is the increasing concentration of major electronic media in ever fewer hands." - Rep. David Price (D-NC)
"The corporation is an externalizing machine (moving its operating costs and risks to external organizations and people), in the same way that a shark is a killing machine." - Robert Monks (2003) Republican candidate for Senate from Maine and corporate governance adviser in the film "The Corporation"
"If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care reform), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." - Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R) 7/09
"Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly."- Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) summarizing the Republican health care plan, 10/6/09
"It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." - Warren Buffett (See charts below.)
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/9-9-09poverty-f1.jpg
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/9-9-09poverty-f2.jpg
http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/9-9-09poverty-f3.jpg
"I refuse to live in a country like this, and I'm not leaving." - Michael Moore
Mooo, BooHoo, the rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer. You socialist are totally clueless when it comes to a Free Republic country like the US. you see, I want as many people as possible to get Just Filthy Rich because I know it is the solution to the human condition. What is not the solution to the human condition is the Failed Socialism, Race baiting and Class Warfare (Groupism) that all other counties thrive on. If it were not for our Free Republic you all would be speaking German, Japanese or Russian. Yet you thrive like a cancer to the US and are successful with it. Well, if it all goes your way and you don't have a Free Republic to save your Azz when some tyrant takes over, then and only then will you realize your misguided ways. I take that back, you will never know or admit to know because stupid can't be fixed. By the way, the Dem's rely on the poor to get poorer and more to become poor because it is how they retain and gain votes. SHAMELESS. HAPPY 4TH OF JULY EVERYONE!
Big Deal-- Summer Jobs
This is just a continuation of Repugs shredding any remaining safety nets for the poor to give yet more to the rich. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/unemployment-insurance-and-disability-applications.html