U.S. jobless claims at 50-year low

“The fewest people in nearly 50 years sought unemployment benefits last week, a sign of a strong job market and an unusually low level of layoffs,” Christopher Rugaber reports for The Associated Press.
“Weekly applications for unemployment benefits dropped 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 196,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday,” Rugaber reports. “That is the lowest level since 1969. The four-week average, a less volatile measure, fell to 207,000, also the lowest point in 50 years.”
“The decline is all the more remarkable once you take into account population growth. The size of America’s workforce has doubled since the late 1960s to 162 million,” Rugaber reports. “Early this year, many analysts were concerned that growth was stalling, with the global economy weakening, the Trump administration and China locked in a trade war, and consumers reining in their spending, as the benefits of the Trump administration’s tax cut have faded. Most Americans got a financial boost last year from the tax cut, but it was a one-time bump. But falling applications for jobless aid indicate that employers don’t foresee an economic slowdown anytime soon.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Strong consumer confidence and the discretionary spending it engenders bodes very well for Apple!
In Q119, the Americas accounted for 36.94% of Apple revenue, by far the largest country/region (Europe: 20.36%, Greater China: 13.17%, Japan: 6.91%, Rest of Asia Pacific: 6.93%).
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