Unemployment filings way up, despite new jobs
In what likely seems like a paradoxical result, the latest jobs report from the Department of Labor shows that the economy added 244,000 jobs in April but the unemployment rate still jumped from 8.8 percent to 9 percent.
What explains this odd result? The weekly new unemployment claims skyrocketed the last three weeks to a high of 474,000 last week, more than offsetting the new jobs created. So for the time being, we’re getting very mixed signals from the key economic measurements.
