Lots of jobs for those missing Claims

So a few days ago I mentioned about the recently bad trend in Jobless Claims (SA), an indicator I like to look at to get an idea of job growth in the US. The NFP is very volatile and all the economists miss by a wide-margin and past revisions are always ridiculously volatile. As volatile as the number itself!

So.. back fo IJC.

I was wrong. They're even worse now and the magnitude and marginal change are surprinsingly bad.

Facts:

Despite the horrendous charts on its trend and level I'd like to mention that today's 4-week change was higher than 99% of the preceding moves since Jan95.

If you consider the 4-week moving average data, which a lot of people like to look at in order to remove unnecessary noise, it came in a tad better: higher than 97% of all 840+ data points since Jan95.

 

A lot of people spoke that there are some special factors built-in this number... such as the Spring Break that people are just finding out happens at this time of the year (like winter in December-February in the Northern Hemisphere) and car-makers stopping production due to supply-issues exported by Japanese seismic waves. Right.

So... bullshit aside, unemployment benefits are being issued and incomes will come in lower despite the reason. In December-Feb it was too cold for people to leave their houses to collect employment benefits. Now perhaps the equity market might be high enough that these people without jobs simply don't need to work anymore. And they're going to Cancun for Spring Break instead!

Now if you consider the great {SEAG} for the NSA Inital Claims ticker from Bloomberg we get a chart that tells us that, hey!, we're still looking pretty damn bad!

Mid February: NSA Claims were 88k lower than 2010. Good.

Mid March: NSA Claims were 84k lower than 2010. Still good.

End March: NSA Claims were 54k lower than 2010. Hey!

Early April: NSA Claims were higher than 2010. Whoa.. easy there, man!

Now: 17k below 2010.. What an upgrade!

Fact: From 90-100k claims below 2010 levels to -20k claims x 2010 in 2 months.
Let's wait for the upcoming numbers.
This is getting exciting!