Weekly Jobless Claims Tick Higher

The U.S. Department of Labor has released its reading on weekly jobless claims for the first week of August. The number of seasonally adjusted initial claims was 274,000 for the week of of August 8. This represents a gain of 5,000 from the prior week’s revised level, and the revision was down by 1,000 to 269,000. Bloomberg had the consensus estimate as 270,000 and the consensus range was 260,000 to 272,000.

The Labor Department also said that there no special factors had an impact on this week’s initial claims.

A smoothing-out factor is the four-week moving average, and it fell yet again by 1,750 to 266,250. That is the lowest level for this average since April 15, 2000, when it was 266,250.

Continuing claims are reported with a one-week lag, and this is what we refer to as the army of the unemployed. This rose by 15,000 to 2,273,000. The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 1.7% for the week ending August 1, unchanged from the previous week’s unrevised rate.

On an unadjusted basis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 239,899 in the week ending August 8, an increase of 15,795 (or 7.0 percent) from the previous week. The seasonal factors had expected an increase of 11,568 (or 5.2 percent) from the previous week. There were 269,468 initial claims in the comparable week in 2014.

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