Jobless Claims: Sealing the Fate for Friday’s Unemployment & Payrolls Data

The weekly jobless claims from the Labor Department is not showing any hope for a surprise win on the unemployment and non-farm payrolls data due Friday morning.  The report from the prior week was revised to 395,000 from 391,00 and this week’s preliminary report was shown to rise by an adjusted 6,000 to 401,000.

The 400,000 figure is back.  The 4-week average aims to smooth out the volatility and that fell by 4,000 to 414,000. One of our top concerns is the army of unemployed measured by continuing jobless claims and that reading (with a one-week lag) fell 52,000 to 3.7 million.

There were three other job data reports that came out on Wednesday:

ADP predicted that private sector jobs were up by 91,000 and Dow Jones had estimates of about +75,000 for September (again, only the private sector).

Challenger Gray & Christmas reported that U.S. employers planned to cut more than 115,000 workers from the nation’s payrolls during September, but about 80,000 were from the Army and BofA. 

TrimTabs Investment Research showed that the “withholding tax based employment model” said that the U.S. economy added only 64,000 jobs in September and predicted that the unemployment rate would go higher.

JON C. OGG