U.S. unemployment claims surge to nearly 2 million, the most in almost 4 years

More Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, but U.S. layoffs remain in the same historically healthy range of the past few years.

Applications for unemployment benefits for the week ending Aug. 16 rose by 11,000 to 235,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s slightly more than the 229,000 new applications that economists had forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as a proxy for layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since the U.S. began to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic more than three years ago.

While layoffs remain low by historical comparisons, there has been noticeable deterioration in the labor market this year and mounting evidence that people are having difficulty finding jo