"It's still a moderate recovery when looking at growth but I think there's a little bit of momentum in the job market"
- Kevin Cummins, an economist at UBS Securities LLC
The world's largest economy barely grew in the fourth quarter, erasing a previously estimated contraction, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Nation's gross domestic product grew at a 0.1% annual rate, up from a previously estimated 0.1% drop and below expectations of a 0.5% gain. Growth was supported by the smallest trade deficit in almost three years, which helped overcome a 22% plunge in defence spending, biggest since the Vietnam War.
"It's still a moderate recovery when looking at growth but I think there's a little bit of momentum in the job market," said Kevin Cummins, an economist at UBS Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut, whose forecast of 345,000 was the lowest in the Bloomberg survey. The labour market is "moving in the right direction."
In a separate report, the U.S. Department of Labor said that the number of Americans who lost their jobs dropped 22,000 to 344,000 in the week ended February 23. The less volatile four-week moving average for new claims, a gauge of the trend in layoffs, also fell to 355,000 from 361,750. Moreover, the report showed that the number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits dropped by 91,000 to 3.07 million in the week
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