The fewest Americans in almost 44 years filed applications to collect unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
Unemployment claims fell by 19,000 to 223,000 in the week that ended Feb. 25, the fewest since March 1973 and below the lowest projection in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The median forecast called for 245,000 applications.
The weekly decline, which was the largest this year, shows employers are keeping firings at a minimum as demand remains steady and the labor market stays tight.
"Businesses are finding it ever harder to recruit, so the bar for letting people go has risen," Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a research note.
Federal Reserve policymakers will take persistent job growth and falling separations into consideration at their monetary policy meeting later this month.
Fed board member Jerome Powell said in a CNBC interview that he believed the Fed was close to achieving its targets on full employment and 2 percent inflation.
"I think the case for a rate increase in March has come together, and I do think it is on the table for discussion," he said.
Powell's comments were the latest in a series of remarks from Fed officials this week that have raised the possibility the Fed will raise rates at its March 14-15 meeting. Fed Chairman Janet Yellen is scheduled to speak on the economic outlook today.
On Tuesday, William Dudley, the president of the Fed's New York regional bank and a close Yellen ally, said that the case for raising rates "has become a lot more compelling." And on Wednesday night, Fed board member Lael Brainard, one of the leading voices arguing in the past to delay increases, said she believed the case for another change was strengthening.
"Assuming continued progress, it will likely be appropriate soon to remove additional accommodation" by raising rates, Brainard said in a speech at Harvard University. "We are closing in on full employment, inflation is moving gradually toward our target, foreign growth is on more solid footing and risks to the outlook are as close to balanced as they have been in some time."
Economists' estimates in the Bloomberg survey for initial jobless claims ranged from 230,000 to 260,000. The figure for the previous week was revised to 242,000 from an initially reported 244,000.
The four-week moving average decreased to 234,250 -- the lowest since April 1973 -- from 240,500.
While there was nothing unusual in the figures, unemployment claims were estimated for Oklahoma, according to the Labor Department.
The latest tally marked 104 straight weeks of claims below 300,000, the level economists consider consistent with a healthy labor market. The 161-week period that ended in April 1970 was the longest such streak in records dating back to 1967.
The number of people continuing to receive unemployment benefits rose by 3,000 to 2.07 million in the week that ended Feb. 18. The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits held at 1.5 percent. These data are reported with a one-week lag.
The Labor Department will release the February jobs report next week. Economists surveyed by the data firm FactSet forecast that the economy generated 175,000 jobs in February and that the unemployment rate slipped to 4.7 percent.
Information for this article was contributed by Patricia Laya and Jordan Yadoo of Bloomberg News and by Paul Wiseman and Martin Crutsinger of The Associated Press.
Business on 03/03/2017