U.S. jobless claims steady amid trade war uncertainty

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. filings for jobless benefits were unchanged last week, remaining at the higher end of recent ranges as uncertainty over the impact of trade wars lingers.

New applications for jobless benefits numbered 248,000 for the week ending June 7, the Labor Department said Thursday. Analysts had forecast 244,000 new applications.

A week ago, there were 248,000 jobless claim applications, which was the most since early October and a sign that layoffs could be trending higher.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are considered representative of U.S. layoffs and have mostly bounced around a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since COVID-19 throttled the economy five years ago, wiping out millions of jobs.

However, the past three weeks, layoffs have been at the higher end of that range, raising some concern from analysts.

“There are early warning signs in the labor market,” said Navy Federal Credit Union’s chief economist, Heather Long. “If layoffs worsen this summer, it will heighten fears of a recession and consumer spending pullback.”

In reporting their latest earnings, many companies have either trimmed their sales and profit expectations for 2025 or not issued guidance at all, often citing President Donald Trump’s dizzying rollout of tariff announcements.

Though Trump has paused or dialed down many of his tariff threats, concerns remain that a tariff-induced global economic slowdown could sabotage what’s been a robust U.S. labor market.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has said the potential for both higher unemployment and inflation are elevated, an unusual combination that complicates the central bank’s dual mandate of controlling prices and keeping unemployment low. Powell said that tariffs have dampened consumer and business sentiment.

In early May, the Federal Reserve held its benchmark lending rate at 4.3% for the third straight meeting after cutting it three times at the end of last year.

Last week, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers slowed their hiring in May, but still added a solid 139,000 jobs despite uncertainty over Trump’s trade wars.

In a separate report last week, Labor reported that U.S. job openings rose unexpectedly in April, but other data suggested that Americans are less optimistic about the labor market.

The report showed that the number of Americans quitting their jobs — a sign of confidence in their prospects — fell, while layoffs ticked higher. In another sign the job market has cooled from the hiring boom of 2021-2023, the government reported one job for every unemployed person. As recently as December 2022, there were two vacancies for every jobless American.

The government has estimated that the U.S. economy shrank at a 0.2% annual pace in the first quarter of 2025, a slight upgrade from its first estimate. Growth was slowed by a surge in imports as companies in the U.S. tried to bring in foreign goods before Trump’s massive tariffs went into effect.

Trump is attempting to reshape the global economy by dramatically increasing import taxes to rejuvenate the U.S. manufacturing sector. The president has also tried to drastically downsize the federal government workforce, but many of those cuts are being challenged in the courts and Congress.

On Wednesday, Google confirmed that it had offered buyouts to another swath of its workforce in a fresh round of cost-cutting ahead of a court decision that could order a breakup of its internet empire.

Other companies that have announced job cuts this year include Procter & Gamble, Workday, Dow, CNN, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft and Facebook parent company Meta.

The government’s report on Thursday also showed that the four-week average of jobless claims, which evens out some of the weekly ups and downs during more volatile stretches, rose by 5,000 to 240,250.

The total number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits for the week of May 31 jumped by 54,000 to 1.96 million, the most since November of 2021.