Initial Jobless Claims Week Ending Sep 25th Seasonally Adjusted: +11K To 362K Vs. 335K Consensus, 351K Prior. Non-SA -8K To 298K. - Seasonally Adjusted Claims Tick Up But Non-SA Fall As Do Continuing And Huge Drop In Total Rec'ing Benefits - Details
Initial Jobless Claims week ending Sep 25th seasonally adjusted: +11K to 362K vs. 335K consensus, 351K prior. Non-SA -8K to 298K.
PUI claims +2K to 17K.
Four-week moving average of initial claims (SA) was 340K, up 4,250 from the previous week's average of 335.75K.
Continuing jobless claims (one week delayed) of 2.802M, -18K lower than 2.820M prior and 2.8M consensus. Non-SA -49K to 2.461M.
Total receiving benefits in all programs (two weeks delayed) was 5.027M, -6.223K.
While seasonally adjusted claims moved up this week, non-seasonally fell modestly. I think you know my feelings that seasonal adjustments while we're still dealing with pandemic impacts can be misleading, but even then non-adjusted claims only decreased by -8k after increasing a big 40k last week. While last week could be chalked up to Hurricane Ida impacts to some extent, if that was the explanation you'd have thought we'd get a bigger decrease, as it would seem those should mostly be past at this point. So not quite sure what's going on. Of course, as I've also noted, we are back to "average" levels of claims so it might just be noise.
Regardless, SA claims were up for a third week by 11k after rising 16k last week and 20k the week before that. Non-adjusted claims noted below did fall back below the 300k mark. The 4-week moving average of initial claims ticked up modestly off post-pandemic lows. Even though pandemic insurance expired a few weeks ago, we still are getting pandemic claims, this week 17k.
Continuing claims, which are one-week delayed, decreased both adjusted and non-adjusted. Adjusted they were -18k and unadjusted -49k. That puts them at 2.802M and 2.461M respectively.
Total receiving benefits had a massive -6.2M drop off all from the pandemic programs (although they still have around 2M people in them.
In all not the greatest report, but non-adjusted and continuing claims did fall. We'll have to see the fallout from the 6M people who have lost benefits when we get September reports next month. Hopefully the impact won't be too bad, and hopefully we'll see claims get back to the post-pandemic lows soon.
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