NEW YORK - April 1, 2010 - Initial claims for U.S. unemployment insurance benefits fell last week to the lowest level this year, the government said Thursday in a report signaling improvement in the troubled labor market.

New jobless claims dropped to 439,000 in the week ending March 27, from a revised 445,000 in the prior week, the Labor Department said.

That marked the second straight week of decline and was in line with the consensus analyst forecast of 440,000 new claims.

Last week's number was the lowest since the beginning of the year and matched that of the first week of February.

The last time there was a smaller number of claims was in August 2008, before the collapse of Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers triggered a global financial meltdown.

However, the figures do not negate the fact that we remain in an extended economic Depression. Official statistics are misleading, because they fail to track the number of unemployed who have exhausted their benefits, nor does it consider those people who have stopped looking for work out of despair and job unavailability.