Jobless Claims Fall to Lowest Level Since July 2008
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- "In another sign that the job market is slowly recovering, the number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits fell last week. There were 391,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Feb. 19, according to the Labor Department said Thursday. That was down 22,000 from the week before, and better than the 410,000 claims economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected. The 4-week moving average fell to 402,000 from 418,500 the previous week."
MP: The four-week moving average of 402,000 jobless claims is the lowest since July 2008, more than two and-a-half years ago (see chart above).
4 Comments:
hey look, they revised GDP down (again).
2.8% isn't really setting the world on fire, is it?
use CPI instead of the GDP-U and this drops still further.
then note that personal consumption (up 4.1%) is up roughly twice as much as personal income and i wonder why commentators are so ready to call this recovery "sustainable".
this is the weakest recovery from a major recession since ww2.
that's what you get for failing to let enterprises fail so that assets can be reallocated and used efficiently.
that was the real mistake japan made and we are so focused on monetary policy, that we are missing the fact that we are imitating them in a very dangerous way.
"There were 391,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended Feb. 19, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was down 22,000 from the week before, and better than the 410,000 claims economists surveyed by Briefing.com had expected"...
Are we talking about this Labor Department?
This ought to be accompanied by a graph of labor participation rate. It is plunging, as people give up looking for jobs.
tom-
if the BLS is to be believed, us population dropped 190k from dec to jan.
the civilian labor force dropped 504k.
this took participation rate to 64.2, a new swing low, but it would have been 64.1.
all this monkeying around allowed an increase of 117k employed (0.05% of civ non inst pop) to yield a 0.4% drop in "unemployment" which was a full order of magnitude greater.
and people wonder why so many folks are suspicious of the BLS numbers...
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