The Jobless Becoming Larger Than Any Standing Army

The change in weekly jobless claims came in at 631,000 for this last week.  That is a drop of 14,000, but that also comes after a revision of the week before to 645,000 rather than the preliminary 640,000 reported.  That is also about 9,000 less than the 640,000 consensus estimate from Bloomberg.  The problem is the continuing claims of those who are becoming full-time repeat recipients of weekly jobless claims.  That number of continuing claims is in uncharted territory with another gain of 133,000 to 6,271,000.  We will not get the report for unemployment in April for another week, and the expectations on this front are continuing to look ugly.  If this jobs data continues, economists are going to have a hard time explaining just how much of a lagging indicator that employment really is.

JON C. OGG