Weekly Jobless Claims Head Very Much The Wrong Way
January 12, 2012 by Jon C. Ogg
The US Labor Department’s reading on weekly jobless claims rose by 24,000 to 399,000 and there was a revised higher figure. The prior week’s 373,000 was revised higher to 375,000. Some of the claims here are obviously seasonal, but this is a step in the wrong direction after weeks and weeks of improvements showing that the figures were coming in well under the 400,000 mark. Bloomberg was expecting a reading of 375,000.
The four-week moving average of weekly claims aims to smooth out the weekly swings and that figure rose by 7,750 to 381,750.
Also on the rise, with a one-week lag, was the army of unemployed measured by the continuing jobless claims and that rose by a sum of 19,000 claims to 3,628,000.
Today’s news was a move in the wrong direction, even if some cyclical theme can be attributed here. We had been getting more and more used to weeks of sub-400,000 and this gets almost back to that level.
JON C. OGG
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