Another Drop in Weekly Jobless Claims from the Labor Department

The prior weekly report was revised slightly higher to 362,000 from a preliminary report of 358,000. To show a smoothing of the figures, the four-week average of jobless claims rose 10,750 in the past week, up to 348,250.

Another measurement comes with a one-week lag, and this is the continuing jobless claims. We refer to this as the army of the unemployed, and this figure fell by 8,000 to 2,874,000.

We maintain that the markets should not be reacting to these numbers too much because the closure of the federal government may have skewed reports, and that has now been resolved for another three months or so. This report was also too close to the estimates to have much of an impact, even if the economic reports had been coming out normally in recent weeks.