Weekly Unemployment Claims: 1.1M New Claims, Up From Last Week

Here is the opening statement from the Department of Labor:

COVID-19 Impact
The COVID-19 virus continues to impact the number of initial claims and insured unemployment. This report includes information on claimants filing Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation claims.

In the week ending August 15, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 1,106,000, an increase of 135,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 8,000 from 963,000 to 971,000. The 4-week moving average was 1,175,750, a decrease of 79,000 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 2,000 from 1,252,750 to 1,254,750.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 10.2 percent for the week ending August 8, a decrease of 0.4 percentage point from the previous week's unrevised rate. The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending August 8 was 14,844,000, a decrease of 636,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised down by 6,000 from 15,486,000 to 15,480,000. The 4-week moving average was 15,841,250, a decrease of 326,750 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised down by 1,500 from 16,169,500 to 16,168,000. [See full report]

This morning's seasonally adjusted 1.1M new claims, up 135K from the previous week's revised figure, was worse than the Investing.com forecast of 925K.

Here is a close look at the data over the decade (with a callout for the past year), which gives a clearer sense of the overall trend in relation to the last recession.

As we can see, there's a good bit of volatility in this indicator, which is why the 4-week moving average (the highlighted number) is a more useful number than the weekly data. Here is the complete data series.

The headline Unemployment Insurance data is seasonally adjusted. What does the non-seasonally adjusted data look like? See the chart below, which clearly shows the extreme volatility of the non-adjusted data (the red dots). The 4-week MA gives an indication of the recurring pattern of seasonal change (note, for example, those regular January spikes).

Because of the extreme volatility of the non-adjusted weekly data, we can add a 52-week moving average to give a better sense of the secular trends. The chart below also has a linear regression through the data.

Here's a look at each year's claims going back to 2009.