- by New Deal democrat
I’ll post on the updated housing situation later this morning. Meanwhile, before I get to jobless claims, a brief update on the tech situation.
It turns out that I am not the only person having this problem. Basically anyone who uses an Apple platform and attempts to post photos on a Google-aligned site is having this same issue. Yesterday with an assist from my local tech guy we ripped both my browsers and photos apps down to the studs and reinstalled them. It worked! - for one time only. The moment I navigated away from this site, the connection was broken. Google would not even permit me to post photos stored on Google under the same account set up for this purpose. This is our enshittified world.
I am going to try one more workaround, but if that does not work, I am probably going to have to do something drastic like setting up a new site on substack. I will certainly give you a link if something like that happens.
Now, to jobless claims …. Which continued to be lower YoY, which is the most important metric. Initial claims declined -1,000 to 213,000 for the week. The four week moving average declined -4,000 to 212,000. Continuing claims, with the usual one week delay, declined -21,000 to 1.850 million:
On a YoY basis, initial claims were down -4.5%, the four week average down -7.2%, and continuing claims down -0.1%:
That jobless claims are down near their 50+ year lows is one of three dynamics keeping the economy from keeling over. The second metric is the continued increasing trend in stock prices, which even after the Iran situation, are up 21.0%! The third is consumer spending by the upper echelons, which has been higher by 5%-7.5% YoY for the past six months as measured weekly by Redbook. Both of these latter two metrics have probably been driven by the AI data center boom
