Jobless Claims Drifting To More Acceptable Levels
The weekly jobless claims data is out and we have a second week of coming below that 600,000 mark. The new figure is down 47,000 to a level of 522,000. The reading of 565,000 originally reported last week was revised…
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That makes two weeks of better-than-expected data. More importantly, there was a monster drop in the army of continuing jobless claims. Those taking repeat benefits dropped down by 642,000 to 6,273,000. That is the lowest reading in about 3 months.
The trick here is in determining if this is just the seasonal adjusted trends or if this is more of the green shoots or continued less-bad trends. Many traders do not believe these to be a clear sign that the jobs market is improving. We would also make the note again that jobless figures have to fall sharply under that 500,000 figure to stop the growth of the unemployment rate.
Jon C. Ogg
July 16, 2009
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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.
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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.
