i gretchen: fox business alert for you. the labor department just releasing the latest weekly jobless numbers. 381,000 first time unemployment claims were filed last week. they were estimating 395,000 claims. so it is lower than expected. eric bolling is here and i have learned from eric bolling that the magic number is 350,000. right. that s the number that once you get below that, first.
381,000 people walked into apply for the benefits for the very first time last week. that is the lowest number we ve seen since late february. last month we did see a pop in retail hiring that may have contributed to that better than expected number. claims really need to be consistently below 375,000 to start to show that we are in a healthy economy. that number seems to be headed in that direction. it has not been in this healthy zone since july of 2008. so that is quite a long time ago. this year new weekly jobless claims averaged 412,000 but they have been heading in a previous direction. bill: come on, america. back to our top story right now. a live look, attorney general eric holder will testify only moments away in the fast and furious gun-running sting. one of the lawmakers questioning holder today is iowa congressman steve king, the republican from western iowa. my next guest and well company back to america s newsroom . thanks for having me
reporter: rick folbaum, new big names testifying on capitol hill. we are all over it. this is one hearing room on the hill. soon we ll be hearing from john corzine the former governor much new jersey, senator from new jersey who was behind that huge bankruptcy, mf global. we will be telephonin testifying about his involvement in that. he s expected to say he has no idea what happened to all that money. that is eric holder the attorney general. he continues his testimony today in that failed disaster, the federal gun running program, fast and furious. you can see he s taking questions from members of congress as well. both of these hearings streaming live right now at foxnews.com. we ll keep you posted on all the developments on capitol hill. back over to jon and je jon and jenna. jenna: the labor department with its numbers today saying applications dropped by 23,000 to just about 381,000 americans filing for unemployment.
time. it s all because of things we think the europeans are saying and when we get different interpretations, it turns the market around. looked like we were going to open about 90 points on the expectation that the ecb was going to say things that sounded like maybe they d be open to buying some bonds. that would give us the beginning of a solution for europe, or at least that s what the market was thinking. then he started talking and we got a little deeper into it, and it turns out he is not interested in buying bonds. at least those are the headlines that have been coming out of the news interpretations from his press conference this morning, and that turned the futures around. now it looks like we ll open down by about 65 points when the opening bell rings in a few minutes. it will be all about the eu in the next couple days. i d be remiss if i didn t point out the jobless claims. a little better than expected for jobless claims in the united states. it was 381,000, which is below
okay. time now for business before the bell. we of got some new numbers out. cnbc s managing editor tyler mathison live at cnbc headquarters. good morning. hey, mika. how are you? the numbers look pretty good. they were the unemployment claims, the new claims for fresh unemployment benefit, and they were down about 23,000 in the most recent week to about 381,000. it used to be that any number below 400,000 was a sign that the economy was expanding. now with the larger workforce, that threshold may be higher. but p 381,000, lowest figure for those unemployment claims in nine months, is certainly a good thing. and just in the past few minutes, after those numbers came out, mika, at 8:30, the dow future, the s&p futures shot a lot higher, indicating that the