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The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment benefits remained stuck near a three-month high last week, a sign that job gains will likely remain modest.

The report disappointed economists, who had forecast a decline in unemployment applications. Even so, most analysts think employers will add about 175,000 jobs this month. That would be more than in March but less than the robust job growth achieved during the winter.

Last week, applications for unemployment aid dipped to a seasonally adjusted 388,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was little changed from the previous week’s figure, the highest since Jan. 7.

The four-week average, a less volatile figure, rose to 381,750, also the highest in three months. When applications fall below 375,000, it generally suggests that hiring will be strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.

The figures “aren’t bad; they’re just not as good as they have been,” said Jonathan Basile, an economist at Credit Suisse.

Applications jumped sharply three weeks ago, a sign that employers had stepped up layoffs and added fewer jobs. Economists said the increase might have been inflated by temporary layoffs during the spring holidays, when many school employees are laid off.

But applications haven’t dropped back since then. And the consensus estimate that the economy will have added about 175,000 jobs in April is well below the average of 250,000 jobs added each month from December through February guaranteed fast personal loans.

The rise in applications follows a report this month that hiring slowed in March, when employers added only 120,000 jobs.

Still, many economists suggested that weather distorted the March jobs report. A warmer winter likely pulled some hiring that normally would have occurred last month into January and February.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke agreed Wednesday that weather has likely disrupted recent data.

The warm winter “made perhaps January and February artificially strong and March perhaps artificially a little bit weak,” he said at a news conference. “I wouldn’t draw too much conclusion from the March report.”

Despite the slowing improvements, the job market appears healthier than it did last year. The unemployment rate has fallen to 8.2 percent from 9.1 percent in August.

Part of the drop came from the fact that people gave up looking for work. People who are out of work but not looking for jobs aren’t counted among the unemployed.

Economists note that unemployment benefit applications remain lower than they were last year. The government’s report next week on April employment should help clarify the jobs picture.

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The unemployment rate has fallen dramatically over the last six months, but just how low can it go?

The answer is being debated among two camps of prominent economic thinkers. One school of thought says that unemployment will return to around 5% as the economy eventually recovers. But an opposing view states that permanent changes in the labor market mean higher unemployment is here to stay.

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Obama battles job crisis

Before Obama even took office, America had lost 4.4 million jobs. Track his progress since then.

Among those who believe the first, more optimistic scenario is Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. He thinks that unemployment will fall as part of the regular business cycle, and stimulative policies that boost demand could bring us back to a more normal unemployment rate of between 5% and 6% some time after 2014.

There’s plenty of research to back that up. A recent report by economists at Harvard, the San Francisco Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund suggests that three-quarters of the sharp rise in unemployment during the financial crisis was in fact due to cyclical, not permanent, factors.

And unemployment has indeed fallen sharply as the economy has slowly recovered from the recession. As of February, the unemployment rate stood at 8.3%, a substantial drop from 10% at the height of the financial crisis.

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Under the second, far less rosy scenario, 5% unemployment is out of reach. Devotees of "structural" unemployment, believe permanent shifts mean the job market may never fully recover, even as the broader economy does cash advance.

Nobel Prize winning economist Edmund Phelps, for example, calls a return to a 5% unemployment rate a "pipe-dream."

Phelps likens the economy to a skater who’s taken a bad fall. Just getting a boost might not be enough, because the skater may have a few broken bones.

What are those broken bones?

Less innovation, increased competition from low-wage countries, more efficient technology and a shortage of high-tech skills among American workers may all be to blame.

Another problem: Baby Boomers are working longer than their predecessors, creating a demographic shift in the labor market.

Plus, many Americans are finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Many workers do not have the skills required by employers in the location where employers are seeking jobs," Wells Fargo Chief Economist John Silvia said in a recent research note.

All of these factors are a recipe for a longer lasting shift in the labor market, and mean stimulative policies won’t have much of an impact, according to the structuralists.

So just how much further will unemployment fall?

The Labor Department will release March’s unemployment rate on Friday. Economists surveyed by CNNMoney are expecting the report to show the unemployment rate remained at 8.3% for the month.

Longer term forecasts are all over the map.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the unemployment rate will eventually fall as low as 5.3%, but not until 2021. Economists at Goldman Sachs, however, estimate that due to structural reasons the new normal unemployment rate may now be 6% at best.

The biggest wild card that could shift that balance is the long-term unemployed. Of the 12.8 million Americans who are unemployed, 42.6% have been out of work for six months or more.

"If progress in reducing unemployment is too slow, the long-term unemployed will see their skills and labor force attachment atrophy further possibly converting a cyclical problem into a structural one," Bernanke said last week. 

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China is likely to see little slowdown in growth this year even as its government needs to overhaul its economy to manage expansion over the next two decades, World Bank President Robert Zoellick said.

The economy will probably have a

President Barack Obama, offering an election-year prescription to spur the economy, said the wealthiest Americans should pay more taxes in the name of fairness, to bring down the deficit and ensure those trying to make ends meet don

The cost of living in the U.S. was little changed in December for a second month as stores cut prices to boost holiday sales and fuel expenses fell, reinforcing the Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve should provide enough policy accommodation to give the unemployment rate, currently at 8.5 percent, a chance to drop, a top Fed official said on Friday.

Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles Evans added he was worried that recent improvements in the U personal loans for people with bad credit.S. jobless rate could be “transitory.”

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Retails sales in the 17-nation eurozone dropped in November, official statistics showed Friday, as consumers felt the bite of austerity measures and feared the currency union could slip deeper into crisis.

Retail sales in the eurozone fell 0.8 percent compared with October and were down 2.5 percent from November 2010, according to Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency.

The steepest declines were seen in Portugal, which had to be bailed out in April and where sales fell 2.6 percent during the month and were down a massive 9.2 percent from a year earlier.

But even in richer states like Germany and the Netherlands, consumers were more reluctant to part with their money, with retail sales slipping 0.9 percent in both countries during November. That shows how the eurozone’s worsening debt crisis is taking its toll even on countries with strong economies.

For the whole European Union, which includes non-euro members like the U.K. and Sweden, November retail sales dropped 0.6 percent from October and 1.3 percent compared with a year earlier.

Consumers appear worried by high unemployment, which remained stuck at 10.3 percent in November _ unchanged from October but above the 10 percent seen a year earlier _ and a darkening outlook on the economy easy pay day loans.

The weak data also underlines how many people found themselves in a worse position at the end of 2011 than at the end of 2010 _ when there were hopes that the continent was turning a corner after two difficult years brought on by the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers in 2008.

Spain’s unemployment rate was highest at 22.9 percent, up from 20.4 percent a year earlier. That’s more than four times as high as in Austria, where only 4 percent of people were looking for work. For the whole EU, the unemployment rate remained at 9.8 percent.

The dark mood is set to continue in the eurozone, with a Eurostat economic sentiment indicator falling 0.5 of a point to 93.3 in December, far below the long-term average of 100.

Italy and Spain, the eurozone’s third and forth largest economies which have been pulled into the eye of the crisis in recent months, grew especially pessimistic about the economy. Economic sentiment fell 4.6 points in Italy and 1.3 points in Spain.

In the 27 EU countries, economic sentiment was down 0.8 point at 92.

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Wallets may soon be going the way of typewriters, pay phones and videocassette recorders.

Oh, they’ll still be a great place to carry photos, receipts and odd slips of paper, but technology forecasters say we’ll soon be reaching for cellphones when it’s time to pay or be paid.

It’s a dream that Kevin Stock is ready to live.

For nearly a year, Stock, of St. Louis, has been carrying around a small white plastic device he can attach to his phone at a moment’s notice, creating his very own credit card terminal. All he needs is someone willing to play along.

“I’ve looked for opportunities, for sure,” Stock said. “But I haven’t been too successful.”

So far, the only taker has been his roommate. Once a month they tally up their bills, and Stock collects what he is owed through a swipe of his roommate’s credit card.

And while Stock has been able to travel no further down the mobile payment path, industry experts say it’s only a matter of time — most say it’s several years out — before we witness a radical shift in the way we exchange cash.

“I don’t think it’s going to go away overnight or in the next year. But mobile payments is where it’s headed,” said Trevor Dryer, head of product management, mobile payments and point-of-sale for financial software maker Intuit.

Already, the financial sector is crawling with companies hoping to carve out a piece of a market that sees billions upon billions of dollars changing hands every year in the form of cash.

Much of that exchanging is done by choice, with some people simply preferring to deal in cash or checks. But there’s also the fact that small businesses often find it too expensive to maintain a merchant account — required to accept credit card payments.

Getting around that was the inspiration behind the Square device carried by Stock.

Square, whose founders include St. Louis native and Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, offers credit card processing services to pretty much anyone with the right smartphone — most iPhones and Android-based phones.

The service is easy to use. An application links your phone and bank account, while the small card reader (the company gives them away) plugs into the earplug jack. From there, you just need someone willing to hand you a credit card and sign the screen with their finger. A day or so later, the money shows up in your bank about, minus a 2.75 percent fee.

The 2-year-old firm has shipped more than 800,000 card readers — 2,500 to St. Louis — and is now processing $2 billion in payments annually. But while that sounds like a lot of money, keep in mind that the nation rings up some $2 trillion annually in credit card charges.

Square is proving popular with a wide range of users, including musicians, massage therapists, restaurants and craft fair vendors.

“Right now, there are 26 million small businesses (in the nation) that only accept cash. It’s a huge market,” said spokeswoman Lindsay Wiese.

Until September, that market included St. Louis Osuwa Taiko, a traditional Japanese drum group that now uses Square a couple of times a month to sell CDs, T-shirts and other souvenirs after shows.

So far, it’s tough to say how much of a boost they’re getting from the device. But Junsei Ito, the group’s treasurer, said they made 20 credit card sales during a three-day Japanese festival over Labor Day Weekend.

“It seems like people buy more,” Ito said. “They don’t tend to carry a lot of cash these days. And they don’t carry checks, either.”

Similar to Square is Intuit’s GoPayment system, which also uses a card reader to send money either to a bank account or a prepaid credit card. Intuit’s mobile division is processing some $5 billion a year in credit card charges, said Dryer, the company’s mobile payments chief.

And while it started as a way to offer contractors, plumbers and electricians an easy way to take credit cards, the company loves to point out that Girl Scouts use the devices while hawking their cookies door to door.

“They are probably using their parents’ phones,” Dryer said. “But it’s a testament to how simple this product is that 9-year-old girls are using it.”

Other systems have looked for ways to remove the physical credit card from the equation. Among them are those using what’s known as near field communication, or NFC. Basically, it lets two devices exchange money when they come into contact with each other.

The technology is at the heart of MasterCard’s PayPass system, in which users tap their credit cards against a PayPass terminal to complete a purchase. In recent years, MasterCard has teamed with Google and several phone and financial services firms to create Google Wallet. Phones equipped with the technology can be used much like credit cards — they make payments simply by tapping them against an NFC terminal.

Several phone developers have included NFC in their devices, with BlackBerry and Nokia making plans to do so. Google’s Android-based devices have it, though the payment service suffered a blow recently when Verizon Wireless blocked its use in the new Galaxy Nexus phone. Verizon is part of a consortium called ISIS that is developing its own payment system.

While MasterCard sees potential in the technology — and the speed with which these trends can catch on — the company isn’t ready to sing the death of plastic. There are, after all, some advantages in having that physical card, said James Anderson, group head of mobile for MasterCard.

Among them, he said: “The batteries don’t go flat.”

One young startup in Des Moines, Iowa, however, is trying to create a new payment system in which credit cards never enter the picture.

Dwolla relies on bank accounts and actually prohibits the use of credit cards. Dwolla’s cost structure is simple: You pay 25 cents for any transaction, regardless of size.

Eliminating credit cards from the system removes the need to collect the types of fees — generally in the 3 percent range — charged on every credit card transaction, said Ben Milne, the company’s founder. Without the credit card fees, he said there’s no reason to base charges on the size of the transaction.

“The cost to move $1 million is the cost to move a dollar,” Milne said.

Not that they come close to moving that much money at any one time. The company’s average transaction is around $450, with a maximum of $10,000 for businesses and $5,000 for consumers. Still, Dwolla is on pace to handle more than $350 million worth of transactions over the next year.

And with some $20 trillion spent every year in cash transactions, Milne sees a lot of room for growth: “It’s likely the biggest market in the world.”

Still, for the Squares, Dwollas, Google Wallets, clearXchanges and GoPayments of the world to achieve widespread acceptance, some things need to happen. Among other things, experts say, there are too many participants. And they expect a wave of acquisitions and failures to thin the herd.

And many of the systems, at least in their present incarnations, are simply too cumbersome, they say.

Andy Schmidt, research director for Commercial Banking & Payments for TowerGroup, believes we’ll eventually get to the point where payments are all based on the simple exchange of phone numbers and email addresses.

As Stock from south St. Louis has seen, people are often reluctant to go through the hassle of pulling out their credit cards for minor exchanges.

“It’s not so much that you might capture my credit card information,” Schmidt said. “It’s that it’s quicker to give you cash. That’s what you are fighting.”

There also are concerns about the potential for identity theft and credit card fraud as credit card information is stored and transmitted through cellphones.

Michelle Jun, a senior attorney for Consumers Union, said consumers should make sure they are protected against fraud.

In general, the best protections are provided by those based on credit cards and, to a lesser degree, debit cards.

Both offer caps on liability in the event of fraud or identity theft. More vulnerable are those that rely on prepaid cards or that link directly to a cellphone account.

“Unfortunately, all of the different protections aren’t the same,” Jun said. “Make sure you know what you are getting into before you start charging away.”

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