Consumer prices were flat in January, . But a driving force behind that good news has reversed itself since then. According to BLS, gasoline prices fell 3 percent last month. In February, though, . So watch for next month's BLS report on consumer prices to tell a different story.
Also this morning, that the number of first-time claims for jobless benefits rose by 20,000 last week, to 362,000. The increase .
For the most part, the number of weekly claims has stayed within a range of 350,000 to 400,000 since the fall of 2011. They've been another in a series of signs that the U.S. labor market is only slowly recovering from the 2007-09 recession.
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