Labor Department Brings Great News on Jobless Claims

The U.S. Labor Department is out with its tally on weekly jobless claims, and the verdict is that it was great news. While other information is out that was not positive, the weekly jobless claims report was close enough to being in-line that it should not be a major game changer for the stock and bond market on Thursday.

Weekly jobless claim continued to improve, falling 3,000 to 302,000 in the week ending July 12 from a revised prior week reading of 305,000. Bloomberg had the consensus estimate at 310,000. The Labor Department reported that there were no special factors in this week’s report, although some may consider that there is still some Fourth of July noise in the report.

The unemployment rate for insured workers was down 0.1% to 1.9%. The four-week average also fell by 3,000 to 309,000. That looks to be a low since the recession on the average.

Continuing jobless claims are reported with a one-week lag, and this is what we call the army of the unemployed. This army is getting smaller, falling 79,000 to a post-recession low of 2.507 million.

Again, great news was seen here, but it just isn’t far enough off the mark to make any major waves on its own. An absolutely dismal reading from housing starts in June is another matter.

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