FW: First Time Jobless Claims

And, of course, we have the first time jobless claims.  If you're new to this, this report is a measure of how many people filed for unemployment insurance in the previous week.

 

Last week, the figures for the week ending 8/6 were better than expected.  New claims for 7/30 were revised upwards to 402,000 - technically putting us at 20 upwards revisions in 24 weeks, although it did only increase by 2000 this time.  The seasonally adjusted 8/6 initial new jobless claims figures came in at 395,000 (beating  while the actual numbers came in at 351,370.   and the total number of people claiming benefits in all programs fell to a level of 7,479,915.

 

But all that was last week.  For the week ending 8/13, our Econoday-surveyed analysts are a little less optimistic, and are expecting 400,000 new claims.  To check the accuracy of the prediction, we turn to the US Department of Labor's Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report.

 

Right off the bat, the DoL breaks with tradition by revising the 8/6 seasonally adjusted initial claims downward to 399,000[1].  That's nice to see.  On the other hand, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims for the week ending 8/13 comes in at 408,000, missing expectations.  The unadjusted number of actual initial claims for 8/13 comes in at 342,669 (down 8,701 from the previous week), and the total number of people claiming benefits in all programs comes in at 7,336,178 (a decline of 143,737)[2]..

 

The markets will probably see beating expectations on new claims as a win.  Will it be enough of a win to offset the CPI results?  We should start finding out here in about 5 minutes.

 

[1]  Improving their batting average to 20 upwards revisions in 25 weeks.

[2]  Sounds nice, doesn't it?  But here's your weekly dose of economic malaise:  the Employment Situation report for July 2011 shows an increase in nonfarm payroll employment of only 117,000.  Now, in the month of July, there were 2,060,000 first time jobless claims.  So 2 million people lost jobs, and only 117 thousand people found jobs.  The operative phrase here is "net loss".