There’d nothing very clear about the trend in today’s report on new claims for unemployment in the week ended on September 12. (The period is important because it coincides with the survey period for the monthly jobs report for September.)
The number of Americans applying for unemployment in regular state unemployment programs fell by 33,000 to 860,000 for the week. Economists had expected a bigger drop in initial claims to 850,000.
Continuing claims fell by almost 1 million to 12.6 million for the week ended on September 5. (Because the universe wants to make life easier for investors, the two unemployment sequences are off by a week.) Economists had expected continuing claims to come in higher at 13 million.
But a couple of items make it hard to figure out what the trend, if any, in the numbers might be.
For example, some workers in states with very short unemployment benefit periods have already seen their benefits expire. While most state programs provide unemployment benefits for 26 week, Arizona’s benefits expire after 10 week. Benefits in  North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada extend to only 12 weeks. Missouri is at 13 weeks. Hawaii is at 14. The CARES Act provided federal funds to add 13 weeks to state benefits. Which still means that workers who lost their jobs in the early days of the coronavirus slowdown are now seeing their benefits expire. Which accounts for some of the drop in continuing claims for unemployment. And, not in a way that argues that the labor market is getting better.
Then there’s also the Labor Day problem. Claims numbers tend to be volatile around holiday periods. And given the unprecedented nature of the job market collapse that hit the United States in the spring, no one knows how that volatility might be expressed.
And there’s also the change in the way that the Department of Labor adjusts its figures for seasonal shifts in the labor market. The department adopted a new methodology with the last report, which makes finding any trend in the seasonally adjusted numbers longer than two weeks impossible.
The broadest measure of claims–one that includes the regular state programs and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program to provide benefits to previously excluded self-employed workers–climbed to 29.8 million for the week ended August 29. (Yep, another data series that’s out of sync.) but this figures has clear problems since it’s know that some states have been counting multiple weeks of PUA claimed as if they represented different individuals.
