These 3 states suffer from the worst unemployment rates

The number of individuals filing new unemployment insurance claims improved to a fresh pandemic-era low last week, falling below the 1 million mark for the first time since March. Yahoo Finance’s Zack Guzman and Emily McCormick discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: The overall market has been trading off of the unemployment update that we got this morning, the Labor Department releasing its report on weekly unemployment claims there. And the metric came in much better than expected-- 963,000 versus the 1.1 million unemployment claims expected there. Of course, this is the first time in a few months that we've seen weekly unemployment claims come in below 1 million, which is insane to think about when we think back to the highs that we saw in the Great Recession not topping 700,000 on a weekly basis. And it took us this long to get back below 1 million claims.

But here to break down that report in full is Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick. And, Emily, I mean, it's taken us a while, but this is better than expected here this week-- and again, back below that 1 million mark. So I don't want to say we're out of the woods yet, but things are much better this week.

EMILY MCCORMICK: That's right, Zack-- definitely getting a much better than expected print on the labor market this morning, a major milestone crossed here for the US labor market. Taking a look, again, at the specific numbers from the Department of Labor's report on weekly unemployment insurance claims, that showed that new jobless claims fell below the 1 million mark for the first time since March-- so the first time we're seeing this number below a million in this pandemic period here in the US.

So specifically, we had initial jobless claims for the week ended August 8 totaling 963,000 below the 1.1 million that had been expected and the 1.2 million from the previous week. Now, with this print, this ended what had been a previous 20-week streak of new claims totaling more than 1 million.

So since the week ended March 20, we've now had more than 56 million Americans filing new unemployment insurance claims. Those jobless claims did peak with a one-week increase of about 6.9 million in late March. They've come down relatively steadily since then, although at the same time prior to the pandemic, we did see weekly jobless claims coming in consistently below 250,000 if we think back to the beginning of this year. So we're still several times above that level.

Now, taking a look across the country, we had nearly every state reporting a decline in new claims last week on an unadjusted basis. Florida's new unadjusted jobless claims improved by 23,000 last week for the largest numerical drop across states. We also had New York state following closely behind with 22,000 fewer new claims filed last week than the week prior.

Then I want to pivot here and talk a little bit about continuing claims-- those also falling to the lowest level during the pandemic period at 15.5 million. That was below estimates for 15.8 million, and the 16.1 million that we saw during the prior week. Now, while continuing jobless claims remain elevated, we have now seen improvements in seven of the last eight weeks worth of reports-- so seeing a little bit of improvement there as well.

A couple other metrics I want to look at-- we have those new federal pandemic unemployment assistance claims totaling 488,000 for the week ending August 8. That was down by about 167,000 from the previous week. Those claims are for the self-employed and gig workers who don't qualify for the state program. So all in all, pretty broad-based improvements that we've seen here. Of course, on a historical basis, these numbers are still very elevated, still seeing a lot of weakness in the labor market as a whole, but at least coming off of those lows that we saw for April.