Weekly Jobless Claims Not Moving Any Serious Lines

The U.S. Department of Labor reported that weekly jobless claims were at 272,000 in the week ending February 20. Its report from a week ago was 262,000. The consensus estimate from both Bloomberg and Dow Jones called for a weekly claims report of about 272,000.

This is a report that did not make many waves in financial markets, and it should not drastically alter expectations for unemployment and payrolls, after last week’s strong report was the sample week for the Labor Department.

As usual, the Labor Department said that no unusual factors affected the report.

The Labor Department’s four-week average on claims, which aims to smooth out any weekly volatility, was 272,000, versus the prior week’s 273,250.
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One aspect of claims that 24/7 Wall St. prefers to focus on is the broader continuing claims. This comes with a one-week lag, but it is also what we refer to as the army of the unemployed. This figure fell by 19,000 to 2.253 million.

The unemployment rate for insured workers was flat at 1.7%.

Each weekly jobless claims report is a seasonally adjusted report. The unadjusted report was described as follows:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 248,703 in the week ending February 20, a decrease of 9,729 (-3.8%) from the previous week. The seasonal factors had expected a decrease of 19,114 (-7.4%) from the previous week. There were 280,639 initial claims in the comparable week in 2015.