Jobless claims at lowest since pandemic

Some 684,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, according to Thursday’s report from the Labor Department. That’s a sharp drop from the week before and the fewest since the COVID-19 pandemic began a year ago.

Is the economy getting better? The economy added twice the number of jobs in February as in January, a shift economists hope will become a long-term trend. But 18.9 million people are still collecting unemployment benefits, putting the U.S. unemployment rate at 6.2 percent.

Dig deeper: Read Harvest Prude’s analysis in The Stew of the latest COVID-19 relief package signed by President Joe Biden.