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Another day, another jobless report

Today’s jobless claims report showed an increase to initial unemployment claims and a decrease to continued unemployment claims. There are also 2.69 million additional people receiving "extended" federal unemployment through a special program.

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This chart shows the most recent total continued unemployment claims over the past two years, charted with the extended claims offered to some by the government since 2008. There has been an increase to initial unemployment claims and a decrease to continued unemployment claims.

Today’s jobless claims report showed an increase to initial unemployment claims and a decrease to continued unemployment claims while seasonally adjusted initial claims remained below the closely watched 400K level.

Seasonally adjusted “initial” increased to 386,000 claims from last week’s revised 380,000 claims while seasonally adjusted “continued” claims declined by 33,000 resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 2.6%.

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 2.69 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.

Taken together with the latest 3.05 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are 5.74 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.

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