More Americans than forecast filed first-time jobless claims last week and consumer confidence fell, highlighting Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s concern that the slowdown in the economy may persist.Applications for unemployment benefits increased 9,000 in the week ended June 18 to 429,000, Labor Department figures showed today. The level of claims exceeded the highest estimate in a Bloomberg News survey in which the median projection called for 415,000 filings. The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index dropped to minus 44.9 last week from minus 44.
After dipping below 400,000 for a brief time, claims have remained about 400,000 for too long. Here's the chart:
3 comments:
none of your relentless cheerleading
Stop lying. Just stop. This blog has in fact been far more accurate in predicting the current economic situation than pretty much any others I've read. See their prediction of May's job numbers just a week or so ago. There is no "cheerleading" going on here, and frankly you owe this blog an apology for promoting such a lie.
Anon -
Spartacus shows up whenever the numbers turn down and disappears when they're good. He's a standard, one trick economic pony whose central thesis is: everything stinks.
Bobdad and NDD:
I note that you both use the seasonally adjusted (SA) "New Jobless Claims" data rather than non-Seasonally adjusted (NSA) numbers from the BLS. Why is that? Admittedly on a weekly comparison basis the SA data is best, though on a YoY basis they should be comparable. Don't the NSA numbers best reflect what is happening in the economy at any one time? I am confident that as the best economic bloggers in the "blog-o-sphere" have a very good reason for using SA numbers and would be interested in your rationale. I have been using 13 week and 52 week Rate of change (ROC) metrics on the NSA numbers to judge the situation. Interestingly enough the 52 week ROC of the NSA numbers is currently in the better (downward) direction and the 13 week ROC of the NSA numbers began moving positive (the wrong direction for the economy) last week and continued so this week.
Keep up your excellent work.
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