by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
It’s time again to look at the trends in claims for unemployment insurance benefits.
The funnies this morning were the headlines about weekly initial claims for state unemployment insurance benefits. They rose to 231,000 seasonally adjusted, “the highest level since August,” Bloomberg’s headline exclaimed. So let’s see. August was of course in the middle of the infamous Q3 2023, when economic growth boomed 4.9%, more than double the normal rate for the US.
Not seasonally adjusted, initial claims for unemployment insurance inched up to 209,000, the highest in, let’s see, three weeks, according to today’s data from the Labor Department. Their seasonal high of 318,000 occurred at the beginning of January when the temporary shopping-season workers file for unemployment claims.