Extended unemployment: Initial, continued and extended unemployment claims

Last Thursday’s jobless claims report showed a notable increase to initial claims and another decrease to continued claims with a subtle flattening shaping up for both series while total continued claims including federal extended benefits appear to be on the rise.

Seasonally adjusted “initial” unemployment claims increased by 18,000 to 460,000 claims from last week’s revised 442,000 claims while “continued” claims declined by 131,000 resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 3.5%.

Since the middle of 2008 though, two federal government sponsored “extended” unemployment benefit programs (the “extended benefits” and “EUC 2008” from recent legislation) have been picking up claimants that have fallen off of the traditional unemployment benefits rolls.

Currently there are some 5.8 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.

Taken together with the latest 5.2 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are well over 11 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.

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