Unemployment Drops.
This week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report has been released. Initial claims dropped to 512,000. This soundly beat the Bloomberg consensus range of 515k to 525k. Last week’s number was revised up 2,000 to 532,000. From the report:
In the week ending Oct. 31, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 512,000, a decrease of 20,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 532,000. The 4-week moving average was 523,750, a decrease of 3,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 526,750.
The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.4 percent for the week ending Oct. 24, unchanged from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 4.4 percent.
The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending Oct. 24 was 5,749,000, a decrease of 68,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 5,817,000. The 4-week moving average was 5,886,250, a decrease of 79,500 from the preceding week’s revised average of 5,965,750.
Once again, we approach the 500k barrier. Fingers are crossed. Please note that the unadjusted numbers are also moving in the good direction:
The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 480,178 in the week ending Oct. 31, a decrease of 14,216 from the previous week. There were 466,341 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.
The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.7 percent during the week ending Oct. 24, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 4,915,719, a decrease of 69,231 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 2.5 percent and the volume was 3,310,892.
The gap between this year and last is narrow enough to be closed. We will move to a point of year over year improvement soon. Whether this is genuine good news depends on whether it happens before or after the holiday season. If it happens after the holidays, it could just be a sign of weak seasonal hiring. We’ll also see the unadjusted numbers rise significantly above the seasonally adjusted numbers at that point.
The good / bad lists give us a good idea of why the unadjusted numbers looked bad in last week’s report.
The good list (-1000 or more): IN, PR
The bad list (+1000 or more): MD, TN, MI, WA, NJ, PA, SC, NY, GA, OR, NC, CA
CA (the worst) was +14,394 vs WI (the best) at -2,346. California continues to fall apart (for comparison, #2 on the bad list was NC at +3,190). Construction gets the most blame, with manufacturing, trade, and services also well represented on the bad list’s comments column.
Back to good news: the unemployment extension was passed in the Senate. It bounces back to the House. Lawmakers indicated a vote as soon as today.
The weekly report gives us a good idea of churn. It tells us how many people are losing jobs, but no indicator of how many are getting new jobs. If unemployment benefits weren’t expiring for so many, we could look at the change in the continuing claims number to get an idea. There’s an easier way. Tomorrow’s monthly employment report will let us know how many jobs were gained/lost on a net basis for the month of October (also, the official unemployment rates). The Bloomberg consensus range is -200,000 to -55,000. The ADP Employment Report (pdf) was -203k, but that estimate doesn’t have a very good way of guessing government hires. The Monster Employment Index inched up one point to 120, indicating slight improvement in job demand vs. September. I include it for completeness, not because I think it’s a particularly good metric. The actual report gives a regional breakdown, which does have value.
To conclude: this was a good report, but the absolute numbers are still high. The short term outlook has improved because of the benefits extension passing the Senate (the House had previously passed a similar bill that died in the Senate). The long term outlook is still disappointing because of the lack of an engine for jobs growth, with the caveat that such engines are usually only obvious in retrospect.
-By crazynutjob.
Read all of crazynutjob’s unemployment report recaps here.
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the405club reblogged this from crazynutjob and added:
-By crazynutjob. Read all of crazynutjob’s unemployment report recaps here.
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