An unexpected jump in new jobless claims the week of Jan. 15 dredged up the kind of bad news that economists fretted had been lurking under the surface of an improving economic picture: The speedy spread of the omicron variant hobbled businesses small and large alike, as mom-and-pop restaurants have been relegated to shutting their doors, big retailers like Macy’s have pared back their hours and hospitals in some hard-hit counties have hit pause on elective procedures to conserve scarce human resources for COVID-stricken patients. To be sure, such weekly fluctuations are what economists call “noisy”—and they caution about extrapolating too broadly from a single data snapshot. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “I’m not necessarily alarmed,” Ken Kim, senior economist at KPMG LLP, said about the 286,000 seasonally adjusted initial claims for unemployment insurance — a jump of 55,000 over the previous week and above Wall Street’s expectations of 225,000. As has been typical with pandemic predictions, the looming question is one of duration: “Certainly, if it continues to escalate in the weeks ahead, that might cause the need for some kind of action,” Kim said. While not nearly as severe as the sweeping shutdown the country undertook nearly two years ago, the fast-replicating omicron variant—which went from being unknown to the dominant strain in Europe, the U.K.

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