Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Jobless Claims, Market Reactions, and Economic Stability 3-28-25
Fri, 28 Mar 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker breaks down the latest jobless claims data, its impact on the stock market, and what it signals for the broader economy.
Chapter 1: Who is Scott Becker and what is the focus of this podcast episode?
Chapter 2: What are the current concerns affecting the economy and stock market?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity in Business podcast. Today's discussion is jobless claims, and we're going to discuss jobless claims in the context of all that's going on in the nation. There's daily discussions about tariffs. There's big ups and downs in the stock market based on concerns about layoffs around Doge, around tariffs and what it will do to the U.S.
economy and the global economy and so forth and so on. And there's also a great reduction in consumer confidence, at least measured by the University of Michigan study. But with all of this going on, all this noise out there, what we're seeing in the real front lines is as follows.
Jobless claims for the last week, new applications for unemployment benefits slipped versus rose and stayed relatively low. At the end of the day, there were 224,000 last week. That's a good, good number. It was right about right on forecast.
Chapter 3: What do the latest jobless claims data reveal?
And with the release of that number, the market's somewhat stabilized today because one of the things you have going on is every time tariffs are mentioned, there's some great fear that goes on that essentially is, oh, my goodness, this is the end of global trade and the end of the economy and so on and so on. And then you get a stat that says, no, everything's kind of fine.
Chapter 4: How did the stock market react to the jobless claims report?
And in fact, it's very fascinating because quite frankly, Java's claims are right at that golden clock spot at 224,000. If they had peaked a lot, it might give the market a little comfort, but give us concern about recession. The market comfort, because it might leave Powell and the Fed to cut rates a little bit quicker.
Chapter 5: Why is the jobless claims number at 224,000 significant for the economy?
But in contrast, if they had gone down a lot and were very low on jobless claims, then you get to the spot where the economy is tight enough, inflation is strong enough, that Powell might have to keep rates low. up higher for longer. So in any event, what you've got going on is this fascinating discussion. We're now seeing all this noise out there.
Everything that's going on, we're at a spot where jobless games are relatively flat. Unemployment's hovering right about 4.1, 4.2%. So still really good numbers. And at the end of the day, we're seeing a slight increase in unemployment numbers around the DC area. And where some of that's related to government contractors, but not a lot more than that so far.
So I guess at the end of the day, the lesson for the week, and again, I'm recording this on Thursday. It'll be released on Friday when JavaScript came out on Thursday. So I don't know what happened to Mark the next couple of days, but I'll tell you at least right now.
Now we're sending all the noise, all the sort of puffing of the chest on the right and the left, all the discussion about how bad this is or how bad that is. It's all going okay. So for the weekend, I would encourage everybody, take a deep breath, relax. It's going to be okay. And keep on moving forward. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast.
Thank you very, very much.
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