Jobless claims jump may be seasonality

I thought I would flag this for paid members. The jobless claims data for the last week came out and it jumped fairly significantly from 375,000 to 399,000. It had been in the 375,000 range for a number of weeks prior.

I would view the data come out on this series as suspect. It is notoriously subject to seasonality at this particular time of year. And so it is fairly unreliable except in making year-over-year trend assessments. in that context, the employment picture in the US has not deteriorated but has improved somewhat.

That said, the question now is how many of the seasonal hires find permanent employment. I have seen an alarming number of mass layoff announcements in the last couple of days and so it remains to be seen whether we are over the hump on jobs. We will need to see the US economy producing 300,000 per month for a good clip, say 6 months, to say that we are on course.

Wait until March for the seasonality affect to dissipate.