Weekly Unemployment Claims (every Thursday)
Also at 8:30 AM ET was the release of last week’s unemployment update. It revealed only 576,000 new claims for benefits were filed, falling short of the predicted 695,000 initial filings and down from the previous week’s revised 769,000. Declining claims is a sign the employment sector is strengthening. Therefore, we can also consider this data to be bad news for the bond and mortgage markets. Fortunately, this is only a weekly snapshot, preventing a negative influence on today’s mortgage pricing.