Weekly Jobless Claims, More Poverty on the Way!

Weekly jobless claims are heading the wrong way and all we can hope is that there is some hurricane and storm bump that has been in this report.  The Labor Department, which should soon be called The Unemployment Department, reported that weekly jobless claims rose by 11,000 to 428,000 last week.  The report from the prior week was also adjusted higher to 417,000 from 414,000.  Dow Jones was looking for a mere 1,000 rise.

The smoothing-out factor of the 4-week average rose by 4,000 to 419,500.  The army of unemployed measured by the continuing jobless claims, which has a one-week lag, fell by 12,000 to 3.726 million.

The old bogey used to be that the economy did not want the weekly jobless claims to be much more than 300,000 but now the world is growing to expect 400,000 as the new normal.  There is just very little to be excited about here.

We saw the incredibly poor economic trends from Census with rising poverty and the lowest median income in years and years, and now we have a list of the poorest states in America.

JON C. OGG