Initial Jobless Claims remain elevated

By Peter Boockvar - June 10th, 2010, 9:19AM

Initial Jobless Claims totaled 456k, 6k above expectations and last week was revised up by 6k to 459k. This level remains very elevated at this point in the economic cycle and still points to a still sluggish labor market. There was however a sharp drop in Continuing Claims by 255k to a much lower than expected 4.462k, the lowest since Dec ’08 but Extended Benefits rose a net 80k. The Continuing Claims drop also comes after a rise of 82k in the prior week. The Labor Dept can’t explain the sharp drop in Continuing Claims and we’ll have to wait a few weeks to see if the delay in passing an extension of unemployment benefits had any impact or hopefully people found jobs as the reason for the drop.

PERMALINK
Category: MacroNotes.

Comments

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

3 Responses to “Initial Jobless Claims remain elevated”

JustinTheSkeptic Says:
June 10th, 2010 at 9:29 am
Bet on the former and not the later. It is a joke that in this day an age we cannot keep better track of what really is going on???? Perhaps we should hire Walmart’s inventory tracking experts.
Transor Z Says:
June 10th, 2010 at 10:03 am
The most recent BLS report said the Civilian Labor Force participation rate backslid to 65% with a loss of ~300k persons from CLF. Sorry to say, this jibes pretty closely with the loss of ~255k from continuing unemployed (i.e., expiration of benefits/discouraged).
foxmuldar Says:
June 10th, 2010 at 7:38 pm
If Congress doesn’t pass another benefits extension shortly, another 1 Million plus will lose their benefits at the end of June. Then they will be asking again, where did they all go. Maybe they found jobs. haha! But think what that will do to the unemployment number. It could be back down to 7% to 8% in a quick way. Obama will be pleased he saved us. lol

What happens when those 400,000 or more Census workers get laid off? Will Obama make it a permanent job so he can say he saved another 400,000 jobs? They can’t be working for much longer. Maybe another month or two. Then what? A big bump higher in the unemployment number again. Im betting they let those 400,000 go slowly so they don’t show a big jump in the number. Thus we taxpayers will be funding census workers for many more weeks then necessary. Isn’t it great spending other folks money.