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Jobs

Weekly Jobs Data: When Less-Bad Is Good

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The Labor Department just released the Weekly Jobless Claims data for the week ended January 3.  While this number is arguably one that could have fluctuated wildly after the same sort of wild surprise the prior week, the results are again a surprise of "less bad" data.  It seems that companies just didn’t fire quite as many people in December as it had before.  But….

Bloomberg had consensus estimates at roughly 540,000 for the week.  Thenumbers came in at 467,000.  But the continuing claims came in upanother 101,000 to a new high of 4.61 million jobs.  We no longer havean army of unemployed workers.  We have two armies of unemployedworkers.

What is interesting is that this and the added horrible ADP shouldaffect the projections for non-farm payrolls tomorrow morning.  The unemployment rate is expected to be 7.0%.  Don’tbe surprised if the non-farm payrolls data now looks slightly "lessbad" than what was expected just on Tuesday.

Regardless of what these numbers were, we expect a huge drop off inretail, temporary, and hourly workers after the middle of the month.

Jon C. Ogg
January 8, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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