870K NEW CLAIMS

More now jobless

Another 870,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as the labor market struggled to bounce back from the pandemic, the feds said Thursday.

The latest filings ticked up slightly from the prior week’s revised total of 866,000 and brought the seasonally adjusted total for the pandemic to about 61.9 million — a number equivalent to more than 38 percent of the nation’s workforce.

Jobless claims have stagnated in recent weeks as the COVID-19 crisis kept workers under pressure. Economists were expecting 850,000 filings this week, according to The Wall Street Journal, which would still have been well above the Great Recession’s peak of 665,000.

The weekly figures from the US Department of Labor are seen as a proxy for layoffs, suggesting that employers have continued to slash jobs as the economy tried to bounce back from the devastating lockdowns that drove unemployment to a record 14.7 percent in April.

“The recovery is losing momentum, and further fiscal stimulus is needed to support jobs and incomes,” Bloomberg economist Eliza Winger said in a commentary.

But Congress has been deadlocked for weeks on another large-scale spending package to support the battered economy. The House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday that’s expected to avert a government shutdown but included only a handful of support measures, such as a continued boost for food-stamp spending.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers Wednesday that Congress and the US central bank needed to “stay with it” in working to support the economy’s recovery. More fiscal stimulus is looking increasingly unlikely before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

“The high level of joblessness shows that the country isn’t out of the woods yet, and it won’t be if the pleading of Fed officials for more stimulus isn’t heard by government officials down in Washington,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at MUFG in New York. “The economy is running on empty.”

The latest jobless-claim figures came a week ahead of the Fed’s monthly employment report for September. The closely watched data will likely show the economy adding 500,000 jobs this month, down from 1.4 million in August, according to Bloomberg Economics projections.