Jobless claims climb

Filings in Capital Region up 93% from year-earlier levels.

Thursday ’s 137,000 increase in initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits was another sign that the economic recovery hasn’t been able to avoid the pandemic.

“The evidence is pretty overwhelming and clear that the pandemic is getting worse,” said Hugh Johnson, an internationally known economist and founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Albany investment firm Hugh Johnson Advisors. “And it’s leading to, at the least, a slowdown in the recovery,” Johnson added.

The U.S. Labor Department Thursday morning reported the number of initial jobless claims climbed by 137,000 in the week ending Dec. 5 to 853,000, a 19 percent increase from 716,000 the previous week. But even that figure had been revised upward by 4,000 from the 712,000 reported initially.

Meanwhile, claims filed by New Yorkers rose by 17,528 to 63,391, a 38 percent increase, according to the U.S. Labor Department figures.

The national figures are adjusted to account for seasonal variations while the state data are not. And that may have played a part in New York’s outsized increase.

“The increase in claims was driven by the Thanksgiving holiday,” said a state Labor Department spokeswoman. “For comparison, there was an 80 percent increase in initial claims in the same week in 2019.”

“(I)t isn’t clear how much of this volatility might be linked to the Thanksgiving holiday, amounting to a game of catch

up,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate. “But the underlying story and trends, including the slowing number of jobs being added in the monthly employment data, are unsettling.”

While the year-ago increase in initial claims had been the largest in more than two years, the initial claims last year, 252,000 according to CNBC, were less than a third of Thursday’s figure.

“I don’t think you can explain all of (this year’s 137,000 increase) to Thanksgiving or to technical factors,” Johnson said.

In the Capital Region, initial unemployment insurance claims last week were up 93 percent from year-earlier levels, the state Labor Department reported Thursday afternoon. The region includes Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady, Greene, Columbia, Warren and Washington counties.

Johnson said the growing unemployment numbers, and the exhaustion of federal benefits programs before the end of the year, made the need for a new federal stimulus program all the more urgent.

Late Thursday, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel recommended approving the first vaccine for protection against COVID -19.