Unemployment Claims

Unemployment claims or initial claims measures the number of people who have filed for unemployment for the first time in the past week.  Generally considered a lagging indicator, it gives a picture of what could be coming for unemployment rates and can be an indicator of future consumer spend (which is already down).  Today, Unemployment claims where up by 19k from the previous week and above forecast by 23k.  Unemployment claims were 479k and was 460k the week prior.  It will be interesting to see how the markets digests this information as it has been out of wack with market fundamentals for a little while now. Currently the market is down slightly with the dow -34.00, which doesn't quite reflect the report.