US weekly jobless claims unchanged amid stable labor market
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits was unchanged last week, but job opportunities are becoming more scarce for those out of work as economic uncertainty from tariffs discourages businesses from boosting hiring.
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits held steady at a seasonally adjusted 229,000 for the week ended May 10, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 229,000 claims for the latest week.
Claims have moved in a 205,000-243,000 range this year, consistent with a historically low level of layoffs.
Companies have been hanging on to their workers following difficulties finding labor during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. President Donald Trump's on-and-off again tariffs have created an uncertain economic environment, resulting in major companies from airlines to motor vehicle manufacturers
pulling their 2025 financial forecasts.
A National Federation of Independent Business survey this week showed the share of small businesses reporting job openings they could not fill dropped in April to the lowest level since January 2021.
Though the United States and China struck a 90-day truce in their trade war over the weekend, slashing tariffs on imports, uncertainty remained over what happens thereafter. A 10% blanket duty on almost all imports into the United States stayed in place as did sectoral taxes.
The number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid, a proxy for hiring, increased 9,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.881 million during the week ending May 3, the claims report showed. That aligns with a surge in the median duration of unemployment to 10.4 weeks in April from 9.8 weeks in March.
Following the reduction of the Chinese imports duty to 30% from 145% for a 90-day period, economists trimmed their estimates for unemployment this year. Goldman Sachs now sees the unemployment rate rising to 4.5% in December, down from 4.7% previously. The jobless rate was at 4.2% in April.
(Reporting By Lucia Mutikani)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
6 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The number of unsold homes in the U.S. hits a record high — is that good news for buyers?
There's nearly $700 billion in unsold homes sitting on the market nationwide, according to Redfin. That's a 20.3% jump from a year ago and, at $698 billion, likely adds up to the highest dollar amount ever, the Seattle-based online brokerage said, citing an analysis of the value of listings on from 2012 through April of this year. And $330 billion of the unsold properties — 2 out of every 5 — are considered 'stale inventory' because they've been on the market for at least 60 days. At 44%, that number is up from 42.1% a year earlier, and the highest for April since the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. So what's behind the big numbers? Here's what Redfin says: More sellers than buyers. Just two years ago, buyers outnumbered sellers but another recent Redfin analysis estimated there are nearly 500,000 more now, 1.9 million compared to 1.5 million. That 33.7% difference is up from 6.5% more sellers than buyers a year ago. Taking longer to sell. It took 40 days for a typical home to go under contract in April, compared to 35 days a year ago. During the pandemic buying boom, when mortgage rates were still at record lows, it took an average of just 24 days to seal the deal. Demand down. Polls show buyers are hesitating to make big purchases, due to the economic uncertainty surrounding President Donald Trump's policies, including ever-changing tariffs. Monthly mortgage payments have also reached record highs. Prices up. In April, the median U.S. sale price for a home was up year over year. But the total value of the current inventory climbed much more, 20.3%, indicating the increase in the number of listings 'is a bigger factor.' Denver real estate agent Matt Purdy said on the Redfin site that he spotted the trend earlier this year, at the beginning of the critical spring housing market that's supposed to be the busiest time for sales. 'A huge pop of listings hit the market at the start of spring, and there weren't enough buyers to go around,' Purdy said 'House hunters are only buying if they absolutely have to, and even serious buyers are backing out of contracts more than they used to.' But he suggested there's a silver lining in the shifting market: 'Buyers have a window to get a deal; there's still a surplus of inventory on the market, with sellers facing reality and willing to negotiate prices down.' Redfin's head of economic research, Chen Zhao, also said buyers may benefit. 'Not only are there more homes for sale than there have been in five years, but the value of those homes is higher than it has ever been,' Zhao said. 'We expect rising inventory, weakened demand, and the prevalence of stale supply to push home prices down 1% by the end of this year, which should improve affordability for buyers because incomes are still going up.'
Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Yahoo
AI startups revolutionize coding industry, leading to sky-high valuations
By Anna Tong and Krystal Hu SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, return on investment in generative AI has been elusive, but one area stands out: software development. So-called code generation or 'code-gen' startups are commanding sky-high valuations as corporate boardrooms look to use AI to aid, and sometimes to replace, expensive human software engineers. Cursor, a code generation startup based in San Francisco that can suggest and complete lines of code and write whole sections of code autonomously, raised $900 million at a $10 billion valuation in May from a who's who list of tech investors, including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Windsurf, a Mountain View-based startup behind the popular AI coding tool Codeium, attracted the attention of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is now in talks to acquire the company for $3 billion, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Its tool is known for translating plain English commands into code, sometimes called 'vibe coding,' which allows people with no knowledge of computer languages to write software. OpenAI and Windsurf declined to comment on the acquisition. 'AI has automated all the repetitive, tedious work,' said Scott Wu, CEO of code gen startup Cognition. 'The software engineer's role has already changed dramatically. It's not about memorizing esoteric syntax anymore.' Founders of code-gen startups and their investors believe they are in a land grab situation, with a shrinking window to gain a critical mass of users and establish their AI coding tool as the industry standard. But because most are built on AI foundation models developed elsewhere, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepSeek, their costs per query are also growing, and none are yet profitable. They're also at risk of being disrupted by Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, which all announced new code-gen products in May, and Anthropic is also working on one as well, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The rapid growth of these startups is coming despite competing on big tech's home turf. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, launched in 2021 and considered code-gen's dominant player, grew to over $500 million in revenue last year, according to a source familiar with the matter. Microsoft declined to comment on GitHub Copilot's revenue. On Microsoft's earnings call in April, the company said the product has over 15 million users. LEARN TO CODE? As AI revolutionizes the industry, many jobs - particularly entry-level coding positions that are more basic and involve repetition - may be eliminated. Signalfire, a VC firm that tracks tech hiring, found that new hires with less than a year of experience fell 24% in 2024, a drop it attributes to tasks once assigned to entry-level software engineers are now being fulfilled in part with AI. Google's CEO also said in April that 'well over 30%' of Google's code is now AI-generated, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said last year the company had saved 'the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years' by using AI. Google and Amazon declined to comment. In May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a conference that approximately 20 to 30% of their code is now AI-generated. The same month, the company announced layoffs of 6,000 workers globally, with over 40% of those being software developers in Microsoft's home state, Washington. 'We're focused on creating AI that empowers developers to be more productive, creative, and save time,' a Microsoft spokesperson said. 'This means some roles will change with the revolution of AI, but human intelligence remains at the center of the software development life cycle.' MOUNTING LOSSES Some 'vibe-coding' platforms already boast substantial annualized revenues. Cursor, with just 60 employees, went from zero to $100 million in recurring revenue by January 2025, less than two years since its launch. Windsurf, founded in 2021, launched its code generation product in November 2024 and is already bringing in $50 million in annualized revenue, according to a source familiar with the company. But both startups operate with negative gross margins, meaning they spend more than they make, according to four investor sources familiar with their operations. 'The prices people are paying for coding assistants are going to get more expensive,' Quinn Slack, CEO at coding startup Sourcegraph, told Reuters. Both Cursor and Windsurf are led by recent MIT graduates in their twenties, and exemplify the gold rush era of the AI startup scene. 'I haven't seen people working this hard since the first Internet boom,' said Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Anysphere, the company behind Cursor. What's less clear is whether the dozen or so code-gen companies will be able to hang on to their customers as big tech moves in. 'In many cases, it's less about who's got the best technology -- it's about who is going to make the best use of that technology, and who's going to be able to sell their products better than others,' said Scott Raney, managing director at Redpoint Ventures, whose firm invested in Sourcegraph and Poolside, a software development startup that's building its own AI foundation model. CUSTOM AI MODELS Most of the AI coding startups currently rely on the Claude AI model from Anthropic, which crossed $3 billion in annualized revenue in May in part due to fees paid by code-gen companies. But some startups are attempting to build their own models. In May, Windsurf announced its first in-house AI models that are optimized for software engineering in a bid to control the user experience. Cursor has also hired a team of researchers to pre-train its own large frontier-level models, which could enable the company to not have to pay foundation model companies so much money, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Startups looking to train their own AI coding models face an uphill battle as it could easily cost millions to buy or rent the computing capacity needed to train a large language model. Replit earlier dropped plans to train its own model. Poolside, which has raised more than $600 million to make a coding-specific model, has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services and is testing with customers, but hasn't made any product generally available yet. Another code gen startup Magic Dev, which raised nearly $500 million since 2023, told investors a frontier-level coding model was coming in summer 2024 but hasn't yet launched a product. Poolside declined to comment. Magic Dev did not respond to a request for comment.
16 minutes ago
Trump's funding bill faces pushback from some Senate republicans
Republican Rep. Russell Fry from South Carolina joined ABC News to talk about President Donald Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill.'
