Less-Bad Still Looks OK in Jobs

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The data from the Labor Department on weekly jobless claims has been released.  We are seeing a slight rise by 4,000 to 558,000 for week.  The four-week average rose by 8,500 to 565,000.  This gain of 4,000 is a tad worse than expected as economists from a Dow Jones survey put the level at -5,000, but frankly is close enough that this will not be a huge influence.  The army of the continuing jobless claims for those repeatedly taking unemployment benefits has come back down by 141,000 to a level of 6.202 million.  We are also getting past some of that seasonality in the reports, and that will help the apples to apples comparisons.

Our big question on all of these jobless claims and also on the unemployment is just how many people are really just dropping out of the system as their benefits have run the course.

JON C. OGG
AUGUST 13, 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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