The Labor Department has released its weekly jobless claims data. The number came in slightly better than estimates, but the jobless claims did rise. The gain was 30,000 to 554,000 in the last week. Dow Jones was expecting a gain of 43,000. So it is less-bad. Unfortunately, it is also a ‘rising’ number after several weeks of falling data. But the good news is that this is still well under that 600,000 mark and the continuing claims came down again.
The army of the continuing jobless claims has shrunk as well, down to 6.22 million from a reading of 6.32 million.
We could argue that some of this is from people falling out of the unemployment system because they have now reached the maximum time allotted to be on unemployment. There is also some seasonality to these numbers.
Regardless of the caveats, at least the jobless data is not back at the highs and at least the gain was less than expected. Or if you are in the camp of the double-dip for another leg down, at least they are not heading in the wrong direction for now.
Jon C. Ogg
July 23, 2009
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