More evidence that the legs of the long economic recovery may be getting less wobbly. First-time jobless claims fell, last week, to a seven-year low and beat, on the downside, economists’ predictions by a large margin. (One sometimes thinks that the economists ought to pick a figure and stick with it, week after week, until the actual number comes in, on the money.)

The actual data, as reported by Lorraine Woellert and Victoria Stilwell of Bloomberg: