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There’s a lovely recent phenomenon of the United States exceeding the gloomy economic forecasts of people who get paid to issue economic forecasts. It’s impossible to say whether and for how long this cheerful trend will continue, but for now let’s savor the double treat of better-than-expected prosperity and a humbling of the highly credentialed. Today brings another serving to the table. Paulo Trevisani reports for the Journal: The number of Americans who filed for new unemployment benefits decreased in the Christmas holiday week… A total 199,000 new unemployment claims were filed in the week through Dec. 27, a decrease from 215,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said Wednesday. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal were forecasting 220,000 claims. Trend Macrolytics observes in a note to clients: New jobless claims fall below
200,000 for a major beat (continuing claims beat, too). Great end to a year of what seems to have been entirely unnecessary worries about the labor market. Time will tell whether the worriers were on to something, but it’s nice to see today’s positive news following the Labor Department’s lovely Tuesday report noting that there were nearly 7.7 million job openings in the U.S. in October. This figure was slightly more than in the previous month and also higher than the total for October of last year.
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