- by New Deal democrat
The BLS reported that seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims rose 8,000 last week to 480,000. The 4 week moving average rose 11,750 to 468,750.
Unadjusted, initial claims rose 28,234 to 530,405, down from 682,176 in 2009.
It is now clear that the ~430,000 readings of late December reflected an over-generous seasonal adjustment. Today's readings, as last week's, are totally consistent with the underlying declining trend since last March. If we go over 500,000 in the next few weeks, or fail to decline further, that could spell trouble, but not now.
Productivity for 4Q 2009 was up 6.2%, continuing the strong trend of employers making more with fewer employees. Probably not coincidentally, January same store sales were reported as strongly positive earlier this morning. Federated's executive, on CNBC, said it wasn't due to increased consumer demand, but due to better "just-in-time" inventory management, meaning stores did not have to resort to reduced sale prices in order to move merchandise.
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3 comments:
On a positve note...
The 52 week moving average of nonseasonally adjusted jobless claims topped out in November at 577,109...today's number conitnued the decline to 553,980...there is a
.91 correlation with this data and
the unemployment rate.
On a negative note...
While most states are showing improving numbers with this metric
one key state seems stuck in neutral and that is California.....
You can accuse of being Pollyanna...but if you look at a monthly chart of nonseasonally adjusted claims, January is always the peak month and while I would have loved a number lower we did get a monthly number of 625,371 which is substantially better than last years 751011 and very close to the
January number for 2002 606644... as a marker the January number in 2008
was 463478
And come tomorrow I think we are in for another shock as the birth/death numbers are released by the number crunchers in our glorious government.
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