Thursday, May 21, 2009

Another Sign of the Upward Trending Economy: Jobless Claims Fall

It is as manipulated as you can get, between Fed money printing and increasing government jobs, but the "recovery" is in full swing.

For the week ending May 16, the seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims fell by 12,000 to 631,000, according to the Labor Department. The 4-week moving average was 628,500, a decrease of 3,500 from the previous week's revised average of 632,000.

The number of actual initial claims under state programs, not seasonally adjusted, totaled 536,588, a decrease of 33,824 from the previous week.

The number of people continuing to claim unemployment insurance rose to nearly 6.7 million from about 6.6 million, the department said, also close to analysts' expectations. That's the highest total on records dating to 1967 and the 16th straight record.

As an indicator of a future trend for the economy,initial jobless claims are a much more important indicator than the total number collecting benefits (which is a lagging indicator).

The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending May 2 were in Oregon (7.4 percent), Michigan (6.9), Puerto Rico (6.6), Nevada (6.4), Pennsylvania (6.3), Wisconsin (6.2), Idaho (6.0), California (5.6), Alaska (5.5), New Jersey (5.4), and North Carolina (5.4).

The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending May 9 were in Michigan (+16,817), North Carolina (+3,783), Virginia (+2,871), Kentucky (+2,768), and Pennsylvania (+2,444), while the largest decreases were in California (-10,052), Wisconsin (-1,691), Kansas (-1,415), Oklahoma (-1,084), and Washington (-843).

1 comment:

  1. Ratio of coincident to lagging indicators finally upticked and direction of revisions for previous months is upwards. NBER has marked (much belatedly) the end of 100% of recessions since data was first gathered in 1960 w/in + 2 mos. of an uptick in the ratio.

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