US jobless claims fell slightly to 215,000 in the week ending 4 July, the Labour Department said on Thursday in Washington, even as economists warn that President Donald Trump's tariffs and his purge of the federal workforce are quietly weighing on hiring across the country.
For context, weekly applications for unemployment benefits are one of the cleanest, near real-time reads on the American jobs market because they largely track people newly laid off. Since the United States emerged from the pandemic recession, these claims have mostly hovered between 200,000 and 250,000, a range many economists treat as a sign of a labour market that is cooling but still fundamentally intact.
