US Weekly Jobless Claims Fall; Fourth-quarter GDP Growth Revised Slightly Up

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell slightly more than expected last week, indicating that the labor market recovery was gaining traction.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits decreased 17,000 to a seasonally adjusted 232,000 for the week ended Feb. 19, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 235,000 applications for the latest week.

Claims had risen in the week ending Feb. 12, which economists blamed on week-to-week volatility in the data and the delayed impact of winter storms early in the month.

With a near record 10.9 million job openings at the end of December, layoffs are minimal and economists expect claims to fall back below 200,000 in the coming weeks. They were last below this level in early December.

Many Federal Reserve officials view labor market conditions as being already at or very close to maximum employment.

Claims have dropped from a record high of 6.149 million in early April 2020. The tightening labor market conditions are boosting wage growth, which is contributing to high inflation.

Rising wages and better job security should, however, help to underpin consumer spending and sustain the economic expansion even as the Fed starts raising interest rates to tamp down inflation, and government money to households and businesses dries up. The U.S. central bank is expected to start raising rates in March, with economists anticipating as many as seven hikes this year.

A separate report from the Commerce Department on Thursday confirmed that economic growth accelerated in the fourth quarter as the drag from a resurgence in COVID-19 infections over the summer, driven by the Delta variant, eased.

Gross domestic product increased at a 7.0% annualized rate last quarter, the government said in its second GDP estimate. That was slightly up from the previously reported 6.9% pace. The economy grew at a 2.3% growth pace in the third quarter.

The economic momentum, however, appeared to have faded by December amid a strong headwind from coronavirus infections fueled by the Omicron variant. But activity has since picked up as the winter wave of infections subsided.

Retail sales surged in January and business activity rebounded in February, data showed this month. That has created an upside risk to GDP growth estimates for

the first-quarter, which are mostly below a 2.0 rate.
The United States is reporting an average of 80,131 new COVID-19 infections a day, sharply down from the more than 700,000 in mid-January, according to a Reuters analysis of official data.

US CDC Proposes Revised Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Thursday issued a draft of revised guidelines for prescribing opioid painkillers, urging doctors to be flexible and individualize their use of the drugs to the needs of the patient.

The CDC’s current guidelines were issued in 2016, largely in response to the over-prescribing of opioids in the United States from 2007 to 2012. The agency reports in 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written for the highly addictive painkillers, enough for every person in the country to have their own bottle.

The result was one of the worst drug-abuse epidemics in the U.S., with addiction and deaths related to the drugs skyrocketing. The CDC reports that from 1999 to 2014, more than 165,000 people in the United States died from overdoses related to opioid pain medication.

But CDC officials said that while 2016 guidelines helped end the over-prescribing of the drugs, they also may have pushed doctors too far in the other direction.

Co-author of the new guidelines, acting director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Christopher Jones, said some doctors were too quick to cut off patients taking prescription painkillers and too strict in keeping the drugs from patients who might benefit.

The 229-page draft of the updated guidelines removes some of the suggested limits the original guidelines placed on administering opioids and proposes individualized patient care. It also offers more options for treating the kind of short-term, acute pain that follows surgeries or injuries.

The CDC published the draft of the new guidelines in the U.S. Federal Register, where the public can view and comment on them for the next 60 days. The CDC will consider comments before finalizing the updated guidance.

CDC guidelines are voluntary, though they are widely followed by U.S. healthcare providers.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press.