Weekly Initial Claims Up

The weekly initial unemployment claims were released today and were worse than expected.   Remember initial claims is the number of persons who filed for unemployment insurance for the first time in the prior week. The forecasted  number was 451k and the actual number came in at 465k.  The prior weeks number was 450k was revised to 453k this week showing an actual increase of 3k over the number released last week.  This added 12,0000 workers who filed for unemployment in the past week using the revised number and 15,000 workers who filed over the reported number last week.

Figure 1 shows the Actual vs. Forecast as well as the 4 week moving average.  Figure 2 shows the actual vs. the forecast and Figure 3 shows the delta between actual and the revision to show how the error in reporting is contracting or expanding (a phenomena that has actually increased in the past year or during our "Recovery").

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3