Weekly Jobless Claims Tick Higher, Yet Set Record Back to 1973

Thursday’s economic report barrage included the U.S. Department of Labor’s weekly jobless claims. The advanced claims for the week ending March 12 came in at a seasonally adjusted 265,000. This may be a low number, but it was a gain of 7,000 from the 258,000 reported in the prior week. The previous week’s level was revised downward by 1,000 to 258,000.

Bloomberg had the consensus estimate at 270,000. As usual, the Labor Department said that no special factors had an impact on this week’s initial claims.

The four-week moving average ticked marginally higher by 750 claims up to 268,000. The previous week’s average was lowered by 250 from 267,500 to 267,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 1.6% for the week ending March 5.
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24/7 Wall St. generally focuses on the longer-term trends of the continuing jobless claims. This has a one-week lag, but it is what we call the army of the unemployed. This figure managed to rise by 8,000 to 2,235,000 for the most recently reported week. The previous week’s level was revised upward by 2,000 to 2,227,000.

If you are looking for a bit of good news, look no further. Thursday’s report showed that this marked 54 consecutive weeks of initial claims below 300,000. That is the longest less than 300,000 streak going all the way back to 1973.

The unadjusted data often looks very different from the seasonally adjusted data. That was represented as follows:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 237,168 in the week ending March 12, a decrease of 10,462 (or -4.2 percent) from the previous week. The seasonal factors had expected a decrease of 16,285 (or -6.6 percent) from the previous week. There were 260,242 initial claims in the comparable week in 2015.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 1.9 percent during the week ending March 5, unchanged from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 2,543,351, a decrease of 57,506 (or -2.2 percent) from the preceding week. The seasonal factors had expected a decrease of 66,803 (or -2.6 percent) from the previous week. A year earlier the rate was 2.0 percent and the volume was 2,729,747.