WASHINGTON — February is shaping up to be another brutal month of job losses: The number of laid-off workers receiving unemployment benefits hit an all-time high of nearly 5 million, and new jobless claims are at levels not seen since the early 1980s.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that the number of people receiving regular unemployment benefits rose by 170,000 to 4.99 million for the week ending Feb. 7, marking the fourth straight week continuing claims have hit a record.
The surge in joblessness has pushed those claims far above the 2.77 million people getting benefits a year ago. The number totals 6.54 million with the inclusion of an additional 1.5 million people who are getting extended benefits under a program passed by Congress last summer.
And those numbers are sure to climb higher, based on the flood of newly laid-off workers seeking benefits.
The government reported Thursday that new jobless claims for last week totaled 627,000, the same level as the previous week but higher than economists expected.
It also was near the recent high of 631,000 hit three weeks ago, which was the most new weekly claims since 1982 when the country was in another severe recession. The three straight weeks of seasonally adjusted claims above 600,000 also is the longest stretch in more than 26 years.
“The labor market is in disarray,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “We are seeing job losses across nearly every industry and every region of the country.”
Based on current trends, net job losses for February could well top 700,000, Zandi said.
That would surpass the 598,000 jobs lost in January, which had been the biggest total since 1974.
Worries about the economy dragged the Dow Jones industrial average down nearly 90 points Thursday to close at 7,465.95, its lowest level in more than six years. The Standard &Poor’s 500 index and the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index also fell.
Even with approval of a $787 billion economic stimulus package this week, economists are warning that any recovery may not take hold until late this year at the earliest, given that the housing market is still deteriorating, the financial market has yet to stabilize and job losses are mounting.
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