many people pay very close attention. here it is. 382,000 first time unemployment claims were filed last week. last week there were 385,000 claims. right around the same number. but i ll let eric bolling talk about that. last week it was elevated. the expectation was 365. staying elevated. something that s happened in the week since last time we talked about this number, the japan earthquake, it happened prior to last week s number, but what we re hearing now is some of the supplier, some of the supply change, manufacturing is global now. so some of the things they produce in japan, they may be having problems getting them here, so it may slow down manufacturing and that will hurt the job recovery. you may end up having the stock market recover, but not necessarily the jobs. brian: we know toyota lost production of 140,000 cars, including the toyota prius, the mini van that s supposed to roll out. would that affect us here, the toyota plants? sure. in fact, gm has said we buy som
martha: it s incredible. the video tells the entire story of how desperate and sad this situation is as it unfold. that is sendai, the city closest to the tape s epicenter. the woman said, thank you, i thought i was going to die. we may never know the full human toll of this disaster. but in sendai alone it s estimated 10,000 people are missing. rick: a brand-new report on the economy. fewer people are applying for unemployment benefits. that number dropping to 385,000. it happens to be the lowest level since the summer of 2008. but inflation has become a
concern. stuart varney is host of varney and company. on the jobs numbers, good but not good enough. reporter: hold on a second. we have two sets of reports here, jobs and inplace. let s deal with inplace. the let s deal with inflation. you look at all the stuff we have to pay for and the cost of living reached a new high. inflation is picking up. now look at jobs picture. we are down to 385,000 new planes last week. but the declining trend just not fast enough to make a serious dent in the overall inflation picture. there is not that much room for optimism on the inflation other jobs front as of this morning. you might start hearing that word stagflation used because we
than the bmw 7-series or mercedes s-class. making the decision to own a jaguar just arational as it is emotional. steve: we got a fox business alert. labor department just releasing the latest weekly jobless numbers. 385,000 first time unemployment claims were filed last week. that is 1,000 less than expected and down from last week. eric bolling joins us live. they were expecting 386,000. down 1,000. it s a wash. right? not even a wash. i wish it was good news. it s really not good news. last week was 397,000. that was 26,000 above expectation. so all we did, we came from 397 to 385, 12,000 fewer, that number right there. 385, that is still elevated. it s still way too high for an
year. what is in store today? we re joined now by cnbc becky quick. i have to think that markets will go up today if they have gone down two days in a row. you couldn t have called it better. volatility is the word for this action. yesterday we saw the dow down 242 points and the dow will open up by about 140 points. again, everyone is watching what is happening in japan. that seems to be the key center of attention. at this point, the market moved higher because we did see japan move off the lows in isits session. it was down at one point by 5% and the nikkei closing down by 1.4%. in relative terms, that was a good thing as wall street sees it. a lot of volatility in all of these markets. oil prices continuing to pick up once again today. last i checked they were up to $2 to close to $100 a barrel, once again. these are all bets that traders are jumping in to and out of quickly. we did get economic numbers today and at least on one point that news was quite a bit better. jobless cla