Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims

The weekly Initial Unemployment Claims were released today.  Initial claims are the number of people filing for unemployment insurance for the first time during the past week.  The forecasted number called for 545k and the actual headline number was 445k, beating the previous weeks revised number of 456k.  This means the number of people filing for unemployment insurance dropped by 11k.  This is the 2nd week in a row that initial claims has dropped from the revised number.

The delta in revisions decreased slightly which is good but still to high.  We need to continue tracking revisions to see what the real trend in Unemployment is.