Image Source: Pixabay
 

Let’s take our normal weekly look at jobless claims. As a general reminder, these are a good high frequency short leading indicator for the economy as a whole, and also somewhat noisily for the monthly unemployment rate.

In the past several months, I have highlighted what appears to be a “regime change” in claims that dates back to the middle of last year, as most weeks since then have seen claims lower than they had been a year previously.

That continued this week, as new claims declined -1,000 from an upwardly revised (by 10,000!) 210,000 last week to 209,000. The four week moving average increased 2,750 to 206,000. Continuing claims, with the typical one week lag, declined sharply, down -38,000 to 1.827 million, the lowest reading since September of 2024:
 

The lower YoY% comparisons continued, with initial claims down -0.5%, the four week average down -3.4%, and continuing claims down -1.2%:
 

These are all positive readings for the economy. It is hard to see a downturn with so few people being laid off. Again, I caution that (1) there may be some unresolved post-pandemic seasonality in these numbers, in which case they will begin increasing in the next several weeks; and (2) they may also be impacted by immigrant labor abandoning their jobs (or worse).

Finally, the significant downturn in initial and continuing claims since early November strongly suggests that the unemployment rate, which peaked at 4.5% in November, is likely to continue to decline towards the range of 4.2% or even 4.1% in the next several months:
 

We’ll find out the first draft of that answer next week.

Finally, an administrative note. As you all are aware, my ability to post graphs to this blog was nuked by Apple’s IOS update in December (and by all accounts, the further update this month is far more buggy). After attempting to fix this on my own, I have contacted the local Apple expert to see if they can fix it — which stinks, because I write this blog pro bono, and the fix will cost me $$. Apparently, my problem is a combination of Apple’s recent crapification combined with retaliatory crapification by Google, such that Google images refuses to recognize the “handshake” from the Apple update.

The bottom line is that one of two things is likely to happen in the next week. Either the problem will be fixed, and I will be able to post images again, or I am going to need to launch a “lifeboat” site separate from this blog for new posts. In the meantime, my readership appears to have been unaffected, so thanks to all of you for sticking with me through this time.

More By This Author:

Regional Fed Manufacturing Indexes Suggest Rebound Continued In January
Repeat Home Sales Indices For November Indicate Continued Rebalancing Vs. New Home Prices - At A Glacial Pace
Stale Data Watch: Manufacturers’ New Orders Soared In November