Jobless Claims Keep Rising; Is It Really A Lagging Indicator?

The poor employment data from yesterday is being echoed this morning.  The weekly jobless claims from the Labor Department came in at 669,000, which  is a gain of 12,000 from the revised week before data which was originally put at 652,000.  The Bloomberg consensus data was expecting 655,000 for this week’s report.  This trend is setting us up for what may end up being a historic number tomorrow of non-farm jobs lost on the payrolls.

The four-week average rose again by 6,500 jobs to 656,750.  That is the highest reading in what looks to be 27 years.  The killer here is in the continuing claims of workers who are out of work and that are repeats of more than one cycle.  This number jumped another 161,000 people to 5,728,000.

The unemployed are arguably now larger than the workforce of the largest city in America.  If you want another statistic, our data shows that just over 3,000,000 American soldiers were in Europe at the close of World War II.

Economists keep calling unemployment a lagging indicator.  Ask these waves of unemployed workers how lagging it feels.

Jon C. Ogg
April 2, 2009