Stocks were mainly flat Thursday, as the markets struggle to digest 6.6M Americans filed for unemployment last week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared on that news, rising by 500 points, with the S&P and the Nasdaq up by about 2 percent each.
Thursday's market optimism comes after the Department of Labor released figures that showed almost 10 million people have filed for initial jobless claims in the last two weeks. “More than any other economic data point, the unprecedented and massive level of more than 6.6 million new jobless claims captures the recent, heartbreaking financial devastation related to the coronavirus outbreak and measures aimed at containing it," said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com.
Focus now turns to Friday's monthly employment snapshot from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though that data will not capture the nation's extreme job loss in the second half of March. “With nearly 10 million total new claims reported over the past couple of weeks, the backward-looking March jobs report will be anti-climactic, given that the survey week occurred early last month. It will take some time for the monthly data to catch up to what’s really happening,” Hamrick said.
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