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Jobs

Jobless Claims Keep Rising; Is It Really A Lagging Indicator?

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The poor employment data from yesterday is being echoed this morning.  The weekly jobless claims from the Labor Department came in at 669,000, which  is a gain of 12,000 from the revised week before data which was originally put at 652,000.  The Bloomberg consensus data was expecting 655,000 for this week’s report.  This trend is setting us up for what may end up being a historic number tomorrow of non-farm jobs lost on the payrolls.

The four-week average rose again by 6,500 jobs to 656,750.  That is the highest reading in what looks to be 27 years.  The killer here is in the continuing claims of workers who are out of work and that are repeats of more than one cycle.  This number jumped another 161,000 people to 5,728,000.

The unemployed are arguably now larger than the workforce of the largest city in America.  If you want another statistic, our data shows that just over 3,000,000 American soldiers were in Europe at the close of World War II.

Economists keep calling unemployment a lagging indicator.  Ask these waves of unemployed workers how lagging it feels.

Jon C. Ogg
April 2, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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