The federal government may have been closed, but the Labor Department did manage to get another weekly jobless claims report out. Due to imbalances in California and elsewhere, we are not willing to endorse these numbers as gospel during this period. Weekly jobless claims were down by 15,000 to 358,000 in the past week. The prior week was revised down to 373,000 from 374,000. Bloomberg and Dow Jones were both calling for 330,000 in the last week.

Continuing jobless claims are measured with a one-week lag, and these fell by 43,000 to 2,859,000. The Labor Department did report that about 70,000 furloughed federal workers filed for jobless claims in the week of October 5, but the economists did not make a guess about how many of the past week’s claims were tied to the government shutdown.

The stock market may not like these numbers in the weekly claims report, but the reality is that many of these numbers may be distorted in either direction until the Washington, D.C., spillover normalizes.

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