New Jobless Claims A Bit Higher Than Forecast

jobs Doug Short: Here is the opening statement from the Department of Labor:

In the week ending April 18, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 295,000, an increase of 1,000 from the previous week’s unrevised level of 294,000. The 4-week moving average was 284,500, an increase of 1,750 from the previous week’s unrevised average of 282,750.

There were no special factors impacting this week’s initial claims. [See full report]

Today’s seasonally adjusted 295K new claims was above the Investing.com forecast of 290K. The four-week moving average at 284,500 is off its interim low of 282,250 set the week ending on April 4th.

Here is a close look at the data over the past few years (with a callout for the past year), which gives a clearer sense of the overall trend in relation to the last recession and the volatility in recent months.

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As we can see, there’s a good bit of volatility in this indicator, which is why the 4-week moving average (the highlighted number) is a more useful number than the weekly data. Here is the complete data series.

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The headline Unempolyment Insurance data is seasonally adjusted. What does the non-seasonally adjusted data look like. See the chart below, which clearly shows extreme volatility of the non-adjusted data (the red dots). The 4-week MA gives an indication of the recurring pattern of seasonal change (note, for example, those regular January spikes).

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