The U.S. Labor Department has released its report on weekly jobless claims. We were wondering just on Wednesday whether the prior trend of higher claims would continue, and now we have that answer. Not only are they not rising, but the revision and the report show that claims are still going to lead to healthy jobs data ahead.

The weekly report showed a fall in weekly jobless claims by 14,000 to the new level of 289,000. This report blows out the Bloomberg estimate at 305,000, also falling outside of the predicted range 295,000 and 305,000. The Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal had a slightly closer estimate at 300,000 but still missed the mark.

The four-week average has also moved down yet again by another 4,000 to 293,250 from the previous average at 297,250. That four-week average marks a new low in jobless claims for this current business cycle.

Unemployment benefits for the continuing claims fell by 24,000 to a seasonally adjusted 2.5 million. This is what we call the army of the unemployed, and it is reported with a one-week lag.

Thursday’s weekly claims report might lead us to ignore last week’s report that the official unemployment rate rose to 6.2% in July from the prior 6.1% seen in June.

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