Washington, DC, Dec. 18--The Labor Department reported that the number of workers filing first-time applications for unemployment benefits dropped by 22,000 to 353,000 in the week ended Saturday.
The total was the lowest since the last week of October. The four-week average, which smooths out weekly fluctuations, sank by 2,250 last week to 361,750.
Economists had expected a more modest decline of 8,000 claims, according to a survey by Dow Jones and CNBC.
The jobs data suggest that the rise in claims in the previous two weeks wasn't the beginning of a new trend, Ryding wrote in a note to clients. "Jobless claims remain consistent with continued job growth, although this report does not yet signal that employment in December has accelerated to the point of robust job growth."
Economists at Lehman Brothers and Insight Economics said last week's decline is consistent with December payroll growth of between 100,000 and 125,000 jobs. The December unemployment report is due out in early January.
The Labor Department revised its preliminary estimate of initial claims for the week ending Dec. 6 to 375,000 from 378,000.
New claims hit a high of 459,000 this year in the middle of April and have slowly declined since then. New claims have been below 400,000, a level economists associate with a stable labor market, since September. But the recovery has been slow, as some companies continue pare jobs to fatten their bottom lines.
The number of workers drawing unemployment benefits for more than a week increased in the week that ended Dec. 6, the latest period for which those statistics are available. Such continuing claims rose by 28,000 to 3,339,000. The unemployment rate for workers with unemployment insurance remained at 2.6%.
