Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Monday, April 11th. I'm Nyla Bouton. Today,

get ready for the summer of revenge travel. But first, the stunning highs and lows of

the American economy is today's one big thing.

Our economic headlines have been dominated by inflation, and an update scheduled for

tomorrow isn't looking good. We're expecting to see another 40-year high in inflation

for the month of March. But there is some good news you might have missed in all of this.

We're also seeing the lowest number of employment claims in 54 years. As Axios' Neil Erwin

writes, a tight job market and high inflation are two sides of the same coin, and he's

here to explain what that coin looks like. Good morning, Neil.

Hi, Nyla. Neil, two years ago, we had 6.1 million people filing for unemployment benefits

in a single week, a record. Where are we now?

So as you say, two years ago, with high pandemic, insane numbers, everyone losing their jobs,

now we're at the opposite extreme. 166,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week.

That's the second lowest of the 2282 weeks, dating back to 1967, we had this data.

So we're in a weird world where fewer people are filing unemployment claims than virtually

they ever have in our modern recorded history. So this is a tight labor market. People who

have jobs are able to keep them for now.

This is the fewest amount of people we have filing for claims in 54 years. What did the

size of the labor market look like 54 years ago?

It was half the size. So it's even more remarkable thing to observe. Look, every week for,

as you say, 54 or 55 years, the labor department releases these numbers on how many people

file new jobless claims. And what's striking is how the numbers we've seen last few weeks,

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