The number of claims for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, pushed up by auto-plant shutdowns and other unusual events that seasonal variations failed to take into account, the Labor Department said.
Applications for jobless benefits jumped by 43,000 to 474,000 in the week ended April 30, the most since August, Labor Department figures showed today. A spring break holiday inNew York, a new emergency benefits program in Oregon and auto shutdowns caused by the disaster in Japan were the main reasons for the surge, a Labor Department spokesman said as the data was released to the press.
Even before last week, claims had drifted up, raising concern the improvement in the labor market has stalled. Employers added 185,000 workers to payrolls in April, fewer than in the prior month, and the unemployment rate held at 8.8 percent, economists project a Labor Department report to show tomorrow.
“April seems to have shown a little bit of a slowdown,” Thomas Simons, an economist at Jefferies Group Inc. in New York, said before the report. “We haven’t seen as rapid an improvement in the labor market as we’ve seen in previous months.”
Stock-index futures dropped after the report. The contract on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index maturing in June fell 0.6 percent to 1,334.5 at 8:37 a.m. in New York. Treasury securities rose, sending the yield on the benchmark 10-year note down to 3.16 percent from 3.22 percent late yesterday.
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