“It is best to look through the weekly ups and downs of initial claims,” said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “The labor market is set for a dramatic improvement through the rest of 2021.”
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 45,000 to a seasonally adjusted 770,000 for the week ended March 13, from 725,000 in the prior week, the Labor Department said. Data for the prior week was revised to show 13,000 more applications received than previously reported.
In a separate report on Thursday, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve said its business conditions index surged to a reading of 51.8 this month, the highest since April 1973, from 23.1 in February. Measures of new orders and shipments at factories in the region that covers eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware also soared.
Illegal seafood imports worth $2.4 billion
The United States imported $2.4 billion worth of seafood from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in 2019, representing 11 percent of total U.S. imports, the U.S. International Trade Commission said in a report released on Thursday.
The report, from an investigation requested by the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee in December 2019, found that the removal of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) seafood imports would increase the total operating income of the U.S. commercial fishing industry by an estimated $60.8 million. Seafood prices and catch sizes would increase for all species modeled.
The U.S. commercial fisheries that would benefit most include those targeting warm-water shrimp, sockeye salmon, bigeye tuna and squid, according to the report.
The International Trade Commission found that over 13 percent of wild-caught seafood imports were derived from IUU fishing. It identified China, Russia, Mexico, Vietnam and Indonesia as “relatively substantial exporters” of illegally caught seafood to the United States.
Meanwhile, the report said Canada, the largest exporter of seafood to the United States, is “low risk” for IUU seafood.
Dollar General indicated the rollout of vaccines and a reopening economy would lead to a bigger-than-expected slowdown from a pandemic-fueled rush for discounted groceries, as it forecast annual sales and profit below estimates. The promise of a return to relative normalcy later this year as more Americans get inoculated against the coronavirus has made the boom in pantry stocking, which made Dollar General one of the bigger retail beneficiaries of the health crisis, unlikely to be repeated.
BP is studying a project to build Britain’s largest blue-hydrogen plant, expanding further in low-carbon energy as it slims down its traditional oil business. The H2Teesside facility in northeast England could produce 1 gigawatt of hydrogen — a fifth of the U.K. government’s target — by 2030, and would capture and store 2 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. In the global fight against climate change, hydrogen has been heralded as a clean-energy answer to the fuel needs of industry and transport.
BlackRock, the money manager that’s made bold statements about climate change, now plans to press companies about their policies related to human rights, as well as biodiversity, deforestation and water. The world’s largest asset manager said it will ask companies in which it holds stakes to identify and show how they intend to prevent human rights abuses, and provide “robust” disclosures about those practices.
