Unemployment: New Claims Down.
This week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report has been released. Initial claims fell to 470,000 while last week’s number was revised down 4,000. This wasn’t quite good enough to hit the Bloomberg consensus range of 430k to 460k. From the report:
In the week ending Jan. 23, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 470,000, a decrease of 8,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 478,000. The 4-week moving average was 456,250, an increase of 9,500 from the previous week’s revised average of 446,750.
The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.5 percent for the week ending Jan. 16, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week’s revised rate of 3.6 percent.
The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending Jan. 16 was 4,602,000, a decrease of 57,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 4,659,000. The 4-week moving average was 4,669,250, a decrease of 94,250 from the preceding week’s revised average of 4,763,500.
Despite the improvement, this is being treated as not-good-enough news. I disagree a bit with that assessment. There are still huge malinvestments that need to be worked through. To really appreciate the good news, one must look at the unadjusted data. The rapid snapback to the trend from New Year’s surge is almost complete:
