Weekly Jobless Claims Head the Wrong Way

The most recent weekly jobless claims have been released by the U.S. Labor Department, and they show a big jump in the wrong direction. Jobless claims rose by a sharp 28,000 to 326,000 in the past week. Dow Jones and Bloomberg both were calling for a consensus reading of 310,000 claims. Also, the prior week’s reading of 297,000 initially reported was revised to 298,000.

The continuing jobless claims, which is reported with a one-week lag and is what we call the army of the unemployed, fell by 13,000 to 2.653 million.

A measurement that aims to smooth out the weekly reports is the four-week average, and it fell by 1,000 to 322,500 in the past week.

The Labor Department said that there were no special factors affecting this weekly jobless claims report.

What should stand out here is that the weekly jobless claims report has been unable to post any consecutive readings of less than 300,000 since the end of the recession.

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