Unemployment Numbers: What You Should Know

If there's an economic recovery going on, someone forgot to tell the US workforce. There were 471,000 new claims for unemployment benefits last week -- that's 25,000 more than the week before. That's also the highest number of new unemployment claims in three months, according to the US Labor Department. The number of new claims had been consistently declining over the past four weeks, and analysts had expected more of the same. The surprise caused spirits, and stocks, to drop.