Jobless claims drop by 8,000
Seasonally adjusted initial unemployment claims declined by 8,000 to 355,000 claims from a revised 363,000 claims for the prior week.
This chart shows total continued unemployment claims since 2010. Jobless claims dropped by 8,000 since the prior week.
SoldAtTheTop
Today’s jobless claims report indicated a decline to both initial and continued jobless claims while initial claims continued to trend below the closely watched 400K level.
Seasonally adjusted “initial” unemployment claims declined by 8,000 to 355,000 claims from a revised 363,000 claims for the prior week while seasonally adjusted “continued” claims dropped to 3.127 million resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 2.4%.
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 2.15 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.
Taken together with the latest 2.83 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are 4.99 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.