Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims

The weekly initial claims were released today with worse than expected news.  The Initial Unemployment Claims measures the number of persons who applied for unemployment benefits in the prior year.  The forecast called for $407k, but the actual headline number came in at 454k.  The prior weeks number of 404k was revised down to 403k.  This resulted in a loss of 51k jobs in the prior week.  The initial claims number has been very erratic the past few weeks with ups and downs from week to week.  The current 4 week moving average shows 428K jobs are being lost per week and seems to be bottoming on the decline in initial claims and heading up from here.