US Jobless Claims rise above forecasts…

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the previous week rose gloomily and surprisingly above the market forecasts as reported today by the US Labor Department, confirming once again to which extent the labor market remains deteriorated and how far it is to witness a full revival to actually continue on weighting on overall economic activities of the superpower and postpone its full healing from the economic predicament.

No wonder that yesterday the FOMC members and Bernanke attested once again that the prior growth lost strength and was weak as well as the labor market despite of the slender signs of enhancement seen this past period since that jobless levels remain high and crucial and keep on limiting the overall improvement and progress of the economy's sectors activities.

Accordingly today we watch on one hand the superpower's initial jobless claims for June 18 inclining to 429 thousand; much worse than the market projections of 415 thousand and a prior reading of 414 thousand, while that the continuing claims for June 11 rose up gloomily to come in at 3697 thousand, which is higher than the predicted 3670 thousand and from a prior reading of 3675 thousand.

In fact companies are less confident about the expansion compared to how they were confident earlier this year due to this past clear weakened and slower revival of the country that pushed the Fed yesterday to slash their growth projections and expect in fact that the superpower will grow between 2.7 percent and 2.9 percent this year, which is actually down from April's estimate of between 3.1 percent and 3.3 percent.

Therefore it is no surprise that the U.S banking industry for instance cut 11,400 jobs in the first five months of this year; 21 percent more than what was cut in the same period but in 2010 while that payrolls only grew by 54 thousand workers this past month, which was actually the smallest gain in eight months as overall economic conditions lost considerable strength this past period.