- by New Deal democrat
As we all know, initial and continuing jobless claims were not reported last Thursday. Which, by the way, is interesting, because they were reported during the lengthy 2013 shutdown and for at least part of the 2018-19 shutdown.
A large part of the reason they likely continued to be reported is that all the Federal government does is collect the information from the States, add it up, and then supply a seasonal adjustment. Which in turn means that we ought to be able to reconstruct the data by going to the States directly.
And on Friday, FRED helpfully posted all of the 50 States’, plus DC, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands’ data. While it didn’t add them up, your trusty correspondent is capable of addition, which means that I can now present you with the YoY% changes in initial and continuing claims for last week, as well as what should be an extremely close estimate of the seasonally adjusted data.
Let me begin with the raw data. For the week ending September 27, unadjusted initial claims from all of the jurisdictions totaled 178,763 vs. 181,017 one year ago, or -1.3% less. Once we have this data, by adding it to the three previous weeks we arrive at a four week moving average of 4.2% higher. Continuing claims with the typical one week delay totaled 1,696,961 vs. 1,616,527 last year, or 5.2% higher.
Since the YoY% changes are the most important, here are the FRED graphs through September 20 of that metric:
Note that both initial and continuing claims have been running in the vicinity of 5% higher YoY all year long, with the exception of most of July and August for initial claims (likely due to changes in the layoff and rehiring schedules for school districts). In other words, this past reporting week both the four week average of initial claims and continuing claims are right in line with their recent averages, while weekly initial claims were lower.
Now let’s turn to the seasonal adjustments. First, here is the comparison of seasonally adjusted weekly initial claims (dark blue) vs. non-seasonally adjusted claims (thin gray line):
Now here are SA (gold) and NSA (thin, grayish) continuing claims:
Both of these metrics are in the time of year where there is a hefty higher seasonal adjustment. Last year in the reference week, for initial claims, the adjustment was *1.2569; for continuing claims it was *1.1310.
This gives us estimated weekly initial claims of 224,000, +6,000 higher week over week. Adding this to the previous three weeks of seasonally adjusted data already available gives us the four week moving average of 234,500, down -3,000 from the prior week. And estimated seasonally adjusted continuing claims were 1.919 million, -7,000 from the previous week. For graphic comparison purposes, here is are the seasonally adjusted numbers through the last federally reported week:
So long as the State by State data continues to get picked up, I will update this each week for the duration of the shutdown. In the meantime, the takeaway this week was a continuation of the recent “neutral” slightly higher YoY readings in the four week average of initial claims and also continuing claims.
