The steady job market in the US has come as a surprise, but the fact that the number of people applying for unemployment benefits has stayed at 212,000 for five or six weeks has caused some people to scratch their heads.
Since mid-March, the number hasn’t changed at all, which has made many people wonder what’s really going on. This week was the only one that wasn’t the same. The week of March 30 had 222,000 applications.
As soon as the results came out, people were talking about them all over social media. Jim Bianco, an expert on the market and head of Bianco Research, asked, “How is this statistically possible?” Five times in the last six weeks, the same number.”
To make an initial claim for unemployment insurance, you have to follow 50 different state rules and visit hundreds of offices and websites. The number of cases filed each week is affected by the weather, holidays, the seasons, and changes in the economy, he said. “However, this measure is so stable that it doesn’t change by even 1,000 times a week.”
A lot of people quickly joined the thread and shared their ideas, such as “numbers are made up” and “someone’s cooking the books.” Someone was blamed for making up the number and lying about what the real number was.
There were some who said that the numbers were very different from state to state and that the current level of unemployment was just due to the time of year.
A spokesperson for the Labor Department said that keeping that number the same for a long time is not normal, but it is also not unusual.
