With the holidays, today's economic data slate was light with only jobless claims on the calendar.  For initial claims, this week's reading came in at 219K. That was down 1K from an unrevised reading of 220K the previous week and was a surprise decline versus the forecasted print of 223K. Seasonally adjusted weekly claims have been on the decline in the past few months, but that only returns to levels right in the middle of the past couple of years' range.
 

Before seasonal adjustment, initial claims totaled 274.7K.  That's not much different from what has been observed in recent years for this time as it basically unchanged year over year, slightly above 2021 and 2022 levels, and slightly below pre-pandemic levels from 2018 and 2019. As shown in the second chart below, the end of the year has typically seen claims rise before peaking shortly into the new year.  Given claims have largely followed standard seasonal patterns, there's still a couple of weeks to go in which claims will likely continue to rise until what can be expected to be the seasonal and annual high.
 

With initial claims simply following seasonal patterns and not rising or falling in any notable or concerning way, continuing claims are a bit different.  After seasonal adjustment, continuing claims jumped to 1.91 million. In the grand scheme of things, that is still relatively low and ranks in the bottom quintile of the historical range. That being said, the most recent reading narrowly surpassed the highs from November marking the first reading above 1.9 million since November 2021.
 

In the charts below, we again show the chart of seasonally adjusted continuing claims in addition to its six-month rate of change, but with a red dot for each time when the level of claims came in at a 3+ year high. As shown, claims are at an interesting crossroads. On the one hand, similar instances of a multi-year high in continuing claims have only been observed in or immediately surrounding recessions. On the other hand, the current level of claims is much lower than other recessionary periods and other three-year highs in recent decades. Additionally, the uptick in claims over the past six months is the smallest of any of these prior instances of a three-year high in claims.
 

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