Jobless Claims Puzzlingly Light, Lowest in 3 Years

Thursday, December 4, 2025

It’s a normal Thursday, which means it’s time for some normal data on Weekly Jobless Claims. Except what’s hitting the tape this morning is anything but normal. Initial Jobless Claims of 191K and Continuing Claims of 1.939 million are far below recent trends, and suggest one of two things: we’re looking at incomplete or otherwise inaccurate data, or the labor market headwinds we’ve seen elsewhere are despite incredibly healthy levels of Americans keeping their jobs.

Let’s assume it’s the latter of the two right now. Although we’re seeing thousands of jobs lost per month in the private sector from data provided by ADP ADP and reading headlines about tens of thousands in layoffs pending from major corporations and elsewhere, jobless claims only occur when an employee finds themself out of work and in need to temporary funds from the government. The current weakness in the labor market may be due to letting retirees’ jobs expire, or pink slips accompanied by longer-term severance payments.

We’ll know soon enough if it’s a numbers issue, but for right now we’re looking at the lowest Initial Claims figures since a blip on the screen in late September 2022; even pre-Covid we were looking at new jobless claims in the 215K range. For Continuing Claims, we did see a lower print once in October of this year, but has been mostly in the range of 1.94 to 1.975 million — without ever touching the psychologically important 2 million longer-term claims — since Memorial Day.

Pre-market futures are up by double digits this morning on the news, as are bond yields for the 10 year (now +4.10%) and 2-year (3.52%). We don’t feel at this juncture that these findings will have any impact on next week’s Fed decision — which still appears ready to drop interest rates another 25 basis points (bps) a week from yesterday — and will wait for future revisions to make any clear statements on the labor market based on this data.
 

Earnings Roundup Ahead of the Bell: DG, KR & More

Dollar General DG outperformed expectations by +39% to earnings of $1.28 per share (versus 92 cents in the Zacks consensus), with a more modest beat on the top line to revenues of $10.65 billion in the quarter. Shares are up more than +5% in the pre-market at this hour, down from around +7% earlier. For more on DG’s earnings, click here.

Supermarket conglomerate Kroger KR outpaced estimates by a penny to $1.05 per share this morning, while revenues came in slightly below expectations in its Q3 report to $33.86 billion. The parent company of Ralphs, Dillons, Fry’s, Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer and more is seeing shares sell off -2.8% ahead of the open. 

Bank of Montreal BMO shares are flat following solid outperformance on both top and bottom lines in its fiscal Q4 this morning. Earnings of $2.36 per share surpassed estimates by +9.26%, while revenues of $6.73 billion were +5.24% better than projected. For more on BMO’s earnings, click here.

Build-a-Bear Workshops BBW posted mixed results ahead of the bell today, with a strong bottom-line beat of +12.7% to 62 cents per share augmented by a -1.28% sales miss to $122.68 million. Tariff concerns are an issue going forward, and shares are down -6.6% at this hour of the pre-market. For more on BBW’s earnings, click here.

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