Weekly Jobless Claims Setting Up For Strong Employment and Payrolls

Something just feels odd about the jobs market these days. The concerns of a serious slowing in new jobs seemed to have abated, but the Consumer Confidence had a serious slowing expected in jobs being available ahead. Now the latest report from the Department of Labor’s weekly jobless claims came in at only 260,000.

There were no special factors in this last week’s report, and the weekly claims report was better than the Bloomberg consensus of 270,000.

The prior week’s report was revised to 272,000 jobless claims versus the preliminary report of 271,000. Thursday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the four-week average was unchanged at 271,000.

Continuing claims are reported with a one-week lag. This is also what we call the army of the unemployed, as this is the group who are taking benefits for more than two weeks. Those continuing claims rose by 34,000 to 2.207 million.

What stands out is that this was the next to last report for the month, and this week having the Thanksgiving week will perhaps skew the data in next week’s report. It really sets things up for a solid employment report due next Friday.

Now the questions begs — can we get a repeat of 271,000 gains in nonfarm payrolls and 5.0% unemployment for November like we saw for October? We’ll know in nine days.