Thursday, June 25, 2009

Initial claims disappoint, as we expected; last week's revised upward

Claims for the week of June 20 jumped to 627k from upwardly revised 612k. The 4-week average of initial claims also went up. It increased to 617,250 from 616,750.

In addition,
as we expected, continuing claims increased, reversing what many "green shooters" were referring to as the start of a downward trend. The only slightly positive news was that the 4-week average of continuing claims declined by 3,250. However, again we have cited many reasons as to why this may be occurring, none of which is a bottoming-out signal of U.S. unemployment. We look for another all-time record of the exhaustion rate in Dept. of Labor's next monthly report.

Lastly, federal program extended benefits, continued to increase week-to-week. It shot up 29,150 from the prior week. We expect this figure to continue to increase. We note that this number lags continuing benefits by one week and initial claims by two.

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