There's certainly been a lot of bad economic news lately, so it is worth noting that with this morning's initial jobless claims data, the 4 week average of initial claims has broken out of its recent 410,000 - 430,000 average to the downside: 407,750.
This is the lowest average number of claims in 4 years, with the exception of mid-February through mid-April of this year.
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P.S. to Doomers: You're still cherry picking your sources. The Pied Piper of Doom has another copy-and-paste job featuring Krugman's article, "Hope is not a plan".
The Doomers are out in force with statements like, "as we doomers said plenty of times we hoped we were wrong, but we feared we we gonna be right. We were right, damn.........."
So guess which lines from Krugman's column were conveniently omitted from the Doomgasm this morning? If you guessed,
Larry Summers puts the odds [ of renewed recession] at one in three; I might be slightly more optimistic, but the risk is very realyou're right. Krugman sees less than a one in three chance of an actual double-dip.
For all of the bad news (and the debt deal makes it worse), there are very few economic series actually rolling over to the downside, and there are a few important ones breaking out to the upside. More next week.
