Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims

This weeks initial claims was released with a worse than expected result.  Initial claims are the number of persons filing for unemployment in the previous week for the first time.  Generally viewed as a lagging indicator, it shows us the most up to date situation with unemployment, but needs to be viewed over a few weeks for trends.  The forecasted number called for 437k, but the actual headline number was 457k.  This exceeded the previous weeks revised number of 437k.