The story of decreased layoffs followed by a bigger decrease in hiring continues. Today’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is out. New claims are slightly down while continuing claims moved to 6,788,000, setting the record once again. Bloomberg reports U.S. Initial Jobless Claims Fall 13,000 to 623,000:

Fewer Americans filed claims for unemployment benefits last week, a sign the biggest rounds of firings may be over.

Initial jobless claims fell by 13,000 to 623,000 in the week ended May 23, lower than forecast, from a revised 636,000 the prior week, according to Labor Department figures released today in Washington. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance rose to a record in the prior week for the 17th straight time, reflecting restrained hiring.

Fewer job losses reduce the risk that consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy, will falter, delaying the economic recovery projected for later this year. Still, companies will be reluctant to add workers and increase production until sales show sustained gains.

“The pace of job declines is lessening,” Mickey Levy, chief economist at Bank of America Corp. in New York, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “This along with some other indicators points to a trough in the recession.”

Really? Here’s some facts for you. Before revision, last week’s figure was 631,000. That absorbs 5,000 jobs of good news. The week before was revised from 637,000 to 643,000. Two weeks ago, the bump was blamed on the auto industry (this claim turned out to be justified). We’ve still not recovered completely from that bump. To get there, we’d have to go back to 605,000. I remember when the talking heads would say that anything over 500,000 was horrible.

I’m still a fan of checking the unadjusted claims, since those are the numbers that correspond to actual people. From the report:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 536,733 in the week ending May 23, a decrease of 4,192 from the previous week. There were 326,518 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.6 percent during the week ending May 16, unchanged from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 6,191,044, a decrease of 12,619 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 2.1 percent and the volume was 2,807,628.

After complaining about the interpretation of the adjusted data, I’m going to state that the unadjusted data actually looks fairly encouraging. The story changes: hiring wasn’t as bad as the adjusted data indicates. I don’t particularly want to jump to conclusions, as there’s still a lot of things that can screw this up. Let us hope this becomes a real trend (insert usual disclaimer about looking for trends in the unadjusted data).

I don’t usually include the list of states extending benefits (mostly because it’s reported with a two week lag), but this list is quite large:

Extended benefits were available in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin during the week ending May 9.

The good / bad lists:

The good list (-1000 or more): MI, KY, IL, IN, OH, PA, MD, IA, KS, OR, LA, NV, MO

The bad list (+1000 or more): GA, NC, CA

CA (the worst) was +5,447 vs MI (the best) at -9,758.

Fewer layoffs in the auto industry gets a lot of credit from states in the good list.

Remember that we still have the auto dealership closings in front of us. To avoid ending on a down note, we also have census hiring in front of us.

-By Guest Contributor crazynutjob.

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