Jobless Claims Rise to Two-Year High

I wouldn’t worry about this just yet, but it does catch my attention:

The number of Americans filing applications for unemployment benefits jumped to more than a two-year high last week, but that probably does not signal a pickup in layoffs as the claims data tends to be volatile in the period following the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits surged 49,000 to a seasonally adjusted 252,000 for the week ended Dec. 7, the highest reading since September 2017, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The increase was the largest since August 2017.

Claims dropped to 203,000 in the prior week, which was a seven-month low. The decline likely reflected a late Thanksgiving Day this year compared to 2018, which could have thrown off the model used by the government to strip out seasonal fluctuations from the data.

Posted by on December 12th, 2019 at 3:34 pm


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