Unemployment

Evidence that companies think that much of the downdraft in the economy represents a structural shift to a lower revenue base instead of a cyclical shift comes from the enormous goodwill writedowns companies are taking.  Case and point is…

Seasonal adjustments for jobless claims are wearing off, but the uptick in claims remains. U.S. Jobless claims for the week ended January 24th came in at 588,000, up slightly from the previous week. Meanwhile, continuing claims reached a…

This past week, jobless claims settled in at a level near 600,000 after a few weeks of decline due largely to seasonal adjustments. Jobless claims were 589,000 while continuing claims were 4,607,000.

This past week, jobless claims in the U.S. soared as they always do after the holiday season. For the week ending Jan. 10th, initial jobless claims were 524,000, up 54,000 from the prior week. However, this figure is completely distorted…

If you recall, last month the figure was quoted at 533,000 jobs lost in November and unemployment came in at 6.7% (now revised up to 6.8%), up from 6.5% in October. The consensus estimate for December, according to Bloomberg was for 7.0%…

Jobless claims fell yet again last week to 467,000. And on the surface this would be comforting. However, the data are marred by seasonal adjustments. The actual non-adjusted data tell a completely different picture of a deteriorating…

ADP, the payroll data company, has shown that the United States is going to see an even larger loss of jobs in December than we saw in November when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its figures this Friday. The number ADP put out is…

It was nice to see a sub 500,000 jobless claims number to end the year after an ugly November and December. However, should note that the fine print is not as good because this number was completely dominated by seasonal adjustments. The…

On Wednesday morning the U.S. Department of Labor released the latest report on claims for unemployment insurance. The week to December 20th saw 586,000 new claims for unemployment insurance on a seasonally-adjusted basis, which is a…

The U.S. Department of Labor reported a fall from a revised 575,000 jobless claims don to a still very elevated 554,000 this past week. On the whole these numbers demonstrate that many jobs are being lost and that the December unemployment…