Jobless claims: all good news
– by New Deal democrat
The weekly news from jobless claims continues to be good. The hypotheses that the summer increase was unresolved post-pandemic seasonality, plus the several week spike post-Beryl was all about Texas, both have held up very well. And that has continued to be the case against more challenging YoY comparisons as the data heads into September.
Initial claims declined -5,000 last week to 227,000. The four week moving average declined -1,750 to 230,000. Continuing claims, with the usual one week delay, declined -13,000 to 1.838 million:
The two year chart really pays off in showing the unresolved summer seasonality post-pandemic both in 2023 and this year.
On the more important YoY basis for forecasting purposes, initial claims are down -0.4%, the four week average down -3.3%, and continuing claims up only 2.0%, the lowest YoY increase in over 18 months:
Needless to say, all of these forecast that the economic expansion will continue in the next few months.
Finally, let’s look at the unemployment rate, which will be updated tomorrow. Although I won’t show a graph, it appears that the post-Beryl increase in *continuing* claims in Texas has now abated as well. But because it continued into mid-August, it would not surprise me to show up in yet another 0.1% increase in the unemployment rate tomorrow. In any event, here’s the update graph of initial and continuing claims (right scale) vs. the unemployment rate (left scale):
This year the unemployment rate has departed from over 50 years of almost continuous precedent by not following initial claims in particular. What the above graph shows me is that, absent the surge in immigration-related unemployment, the unemployment rate would be trending down towards 3.8%.