By Geoffrey Smith
- U.S. stock markets opened higher on Thursday amid signs that the flood of initial jobless claims due to various state-wide lockdowns may be easing.
By 9:35 AM ET (1335 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 163 points or 0.7% at 23,667 points. The S&P 500 was up 0.8%, while the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.7%.
Earlier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had said that the number of Americans filing initial claims for unemployment benefits fell to 4.43 million last weeks from a downwardly revised 5.23 million the week before. Continuing claims also came in slightly lower than expected at 15.98 million.
The numbers mean that over 26 million people had filed for benefits in the five weeks since the wave of coronavirus-related shutdowns began.
