Jobs

Jobless Claims Offer Little Hope For Friday’s Payrolls Data

Weekly Jobless Claims were just released by the US Labor Department and the numbers came in at 570,000 again on the preliminary claims figure.  Last week was originally reported as 570,000, and that figure was revised to 574,000. The four-week…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published September 3, 2009, 8:36am ET · 1 min read

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Weekly Jobless Claims were just released by the US Labor Department and the numbers came in at 570,000 again on the preliminary claims figure.  Last week was originally reported as 570,000, and that figure was revised to 574,000. The four-week average rose by 4,000 to 571,250. The army of the unemployed measured by the continuing claims is going the wrong way and sets a prelude for making the July unemployment rate drop look like a fluke.  This figure rose by another 92,000 to 6,234,000 after being listed a week ago as 6.133 million.

The good news is that we are not seeing the old 600,000 plus and that the army of continuing claims is not challenging that 7 million mark.  Either way, this does not set the tone for a great unemployment and non-farm payrolls data for Friday.

Technically, this data might not be a window until the September unemployment data and non-Farm payrolls.  But this will not exactly act to drive tomorrow’s unemployment under the Bloomberg estimate of 9.6% nor will it exactly add a belief that non-farm payrolls will come in much better than the Bloomberg estimate of -200,000 for non-Farm Payrolls.

JON C. OGG

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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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