The Labor Department has released its new round of weekly jobless claims. The jobless claims filed last week came in 601,000, and Bloomberg showed the consensus estimate from economists as 625,000. We had an unofficial whisper number at around 600,000, so that official estimate may have been artificially high. The preliminary figure last week showed 621,000, and that was revised to a new reading of 625,000.
The big kahuna here was the continuing jobless claims. Last week’s figure of -15,000 was the first drop since the first week of January. That was not repeated as the continuing claims rose by 59,000 to 6.816 million. That is back to a record since being tracked on the continuing claims front.
If we hit 7 million on the continuing claims over the summer, then there are going to be more and more questions about how lagging of an indicator unemployment really is.
JON C. OGG
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