While this morning’s much delayed September jobs report was the big news of the day, the DoL did resume their normal weekly reporting of unemployment claims, so let me in turn resume my normal weekly note of them.

Initial claims declined -8,000 to 220,000 while the four week moving average (whether using the last September report for the first such week, or my tabulation for that week) declined to 224,750. Continuing claims, with the typical one week delay, rose 28,000 to 1.974 million, a new four year high:

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On the YoY% basis I use for forecasting purposes, initial claims were up 1.6%, the four week average up 2.6%, and continuing claims up 4.3%:

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The new high in continuing claims suggests that the economy has gotten even weaker in the wake of the government shutdown, but the small increase YoY suggests it is not in recessionary territory at this point. Still, one of my mantras is that “hiring precedes firing,” which in this context means that hiring slows down before layoffs increase. It would appear that we are on the cusp of this phase.

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