Tag: Statistics

Unemployment Claims Steady This Week

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Unemployment claims were basically flat at 751,000, a drop of about seven thousand.

This is not indicative of a recovery:

The pace of the labor market recovery showed fresh signs of cooling last week, with new applications for unemployment benefits holding nearly steady as virus cases surged in several states.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits fell by 7,000 to a seasonally adjusted 751,000 in the week ended Oct. 31, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was the lowest level since mid-March, but was well above the 217,000 claims filed in late February, before economic shutdowns to control the spread of the new coronavirus began.

The previous week’s data were revised up by 7,000 to 758,000.

“The level of filings is trending down over time, but this downward trend has flattened noticeably,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. economist Daniel Silver wrote in a note to clients. “This is consistent with the idea that the labor market continues to recover, but that the pace of improvement has moderated.”

As I’ve noted before, the initial recovery was 1 part dead cat bounce, and 1 part the stimulus package,and both of those have expires.

GDP and Unemployment Numbers Today

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The initial jobless claims numbers are out, and they are not so bad: 

The number of Americans filing initial claims for unemployment insurance fell last week to the lowest level since the pandemic began, suggesting layoffs are easing despite a rise in coronavirus infections.

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 40,000 to 751,000 in the week through Oct. 24, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was the lowest level of claims since mid-March, just before the pandemic shut down much business activity throughout the U.S.

But the other shoe dropped on the Covid front:

Daily virus infections reached new highs over the past week, and it is too early to tell how employers and consumers will respond.

Claims remain exceptionally high by historical standards. Last week’s new claims were more than three times the weekly average early this year, before the pandemic. Initial claims, which reflect the number of people laid off only recently and not those receiving assistance for more than a week, are just one measure of unemployment assistance. In total, more than 20 million Americans are still receiving unemployment benefits through regular state and emergency programs.

The GDP numbers for the 3rd quarter also came out today, and that initial report shows that the economy grew at 7.4% between July and September, which is impressive, but with the stimulus having ended, and Covid infections hitting new records, I am calling (as I always do) a dead cat bounce:

U.S. economic output increased at the fastest pace on record last quarter as businesses began to reopen and customers returned to stores. But the economy has climbed only partway out of its pandemic-induced hole, and progress is slowing.

Gross domestic product grew 7.4 percent in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. The gain, the equivalent of 33.1 percent on an annualized basis, was by far the biggest since reliable statistics began after World War II.

The rebound was fueled in part by trillions of dollars in federal assistance to households and businesses. That aid has since dried up, even as the recovery remains far from complete: The economy in the third quarter was 3.5 percent smaller than at the end of 2019, before the pandemic. By comparison, G.D.P. shrank 4 percent over the entire year and a half of the Great Recession a decade ago.

………

Economists said the third-quarter figures revealed less about the strength of the recovery than about the severity of the collapse that preceded it. G.D.P. fell 1.3 percent in the first quarter and 9 percent in the second as the pandemic forced widespread business closures. A big rebound was inevitable once the economy began to reopen. The challenge is what comes next.

I do not think that the 4th quarter will come even close to the numbers, particularly with Covid exploding.

*It’s an old Wall Street saying, “Even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height.”

Good News on Initial Claims

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They have fallen to within spitting distance of the pre-2020 record.

Obviously, this is good news only in a relative context.

 I still do not know what is keeping the economy afloat

New applications for unemployment benefits so far this month fell to the lowest levels since the coronavirus pandemic shut many businesses in March, a sign of improvement for the U.S. economy.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 55,000 to a seasonally adjusted 787,000 in the week ended Oct. 17, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims for the prior two weeks were revised lower, reflecting new data from California. The revised level of claims for the week ended Oct. 3—767,000—was the lowest since the March 14 week, when less than 300,000 new claims were filed.

Declining layoffs add to indicators the economy is continuing to heal from the pandemic downturn. The National Association of Realtors reported Thursday that existing-home sales rose 9.4% in September to the highest level since 2006, and consumer spending rose last month, despite historically high unemployment.

Still, with millions out of work and concerns about a resurgence of the virus in many parts of the country, many economists expect the pace of economic recovery to slow.

 Still waiting for the other shoe to drop,

Initial Jobless Claims Up

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Initial unemployment claims rose by 53,000 to 898,000 last week. 

Some recovery, huh?

The much-touted recovery is increasingly looking like a dead cat bounce:

The number of Americans filing new applications for unemployment benefits rose last week to the highest level since late August, with fresh layoffs adding to other signs the economic recovery is losing steam as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

Claims increased to 898,000 last week, holding well above the pre-pandemic high point of 695,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. After declining from a peak of near 7 million in March, weekly claims have clocked in between 800,000 and 900,000 for more than a month as companies readjust their head counts.

The economy more broadly is flashing signs of slowdown. Monthly job gains have cooled recently, as has growth in consumer spending and factory output.

“The jobless claims continued to reflect very difficult labor market conditions,” said Kathy Bostjancic, an economist at Oxford Economics. “It’s representative of still uncertain and challenging economic conditions at large.”


The number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, fell to about 10 million in the week ended Oct. 3 from 11.2 million the previous week, according to the Labor Department. So-called continuing claims declined throughout the summer, indicating employers continued to hire workers.
However, some of the recent declines in continuing claims represent individuals who have exhausted the maximum duration of payments available through regular state programs, and are now collecting money through a federal program that provides an extra 13 weeks of benefits. About 2.8 million people were receiving aid through this extended-benefits program in the week ended Sept. 26—the largest number since the program began this spring, Labor Department data show.

………

This suggests many Americans are experiencing long spells of joblessness and relying on unemployment insurance to keep paying bills. The extended-benefits program is set to expire at the end of this year without additional federal stimulus. ………

………

Weekly figures can be volatile, but the four-week moving average for claims rose as well, to 866,250, a sign more workers are losing their jobs.

“We’ve seen a number of large firms report layoffs, some of it because the pace of recovery is slower than maybe they had hoped for,” Ms. Bostjancic said.

A Wall Street Journal survey found more than half of business and academic economists polled this month said they didn’t expect the labor market to regain all the jobs from the pandemic until 2023 or later. That is a slower timeline than economists predicted six months ago.

There will be no V-shaped recovery.

Of Course There Is No Useful Information

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In news that should surprise no one, Amazon’s study of Covid illness and death at its factories is appears to be intended primarily to obscure any meaningful data:

Amazon.com Inc.’s analysis of Covid-19 infection rates among its workers has several flaws and falls short of assessing whether the world’s biggest online retailer did a good job protecting its workforce through the pandemic, according to infectious disease experts who track pandemics.

Last week, Amazon said that almost 20,000 of its U.S. workers had tested positive for the coronavirus during a six-and-a-half-month period. Amazon, one of only a few companies to provide such data, said the infection rate in its ranks was lower than that of most states, a finding it cited as evidence that investments in sanitation, temperature checks and protective equipment were keeping workers safe.

But three experts interviewed by Bloomberg said the data was unhelpful because it failed to reveal whether the infection rate was improving or growing worse. One said Amazon’s comparison of its workforce to the general population is fundamentally flawed and reveals a lack of understanding of epidemiology. So while the announcement may have helped assuage some critics who say Amazon hasn’t done enough to protect workers toiling through a pandemic, it was essentially useless for employees trying to assess whether it’s safe to show up for work, they said.

Amazon doesn’t give a damn about the safety and security of its employees.  This report is an exercise in PR.

US unemployment rate falls to 7.9% in last look at jobs market before elections | Business | The Guardian

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Scariest jobs chart ever, H/T Calculated Risk

The monthly jobs numbers came out, and it missed expectations.

This is not surprising. The stimulus ended 2 months ago, and there is not a lot to move the economy along:

Hiring gains slowed sharply heading into the fall as more layoffs turned permanent, adding to signs that the U.S. economy faces a long slog to fully recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Employers added 661,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday. The increase in payrolls showed the labor market continued to dig out of the hole created by the pandemic, but at a much slower pace than over the summer.

The U.S. has replaced 11.4 million of the 22 million jobs lost in March and April, at the beginning of the pandemic. Job growth, though, is cooling, and last month marked the first time since April that net hiring was below one million.

………

Other signs of a slowing U.S. recovery include a drop in household income at the end of the summer and smaller gains in consumer spending, the economy’s main driver.

The unemployment rate fell to 7.9% in September from 8.4% the prior month. Though the jobless rate is down sharply from a pandemic high of near 15% in April, last month’s drop partially reflected an increase in permanent layoffs and more people leaving the labor force. That could stem from more workers quitting their job searches due to weak employment prospects or child-care responsibilities.

………

Large corporate layoffs are sweeping across the U.S. Walt Disney Co. earlier this week announced permanent layoffs for 28,000 theme park workers who were previously on temporary furlough. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. will proceed for now with a total of more than 32,000 job cuts after lawmakers were unable to agree on a broad coronavirus-relief package.

The recent layoff announcements aren’t reflected in the September jobs report, which includes data gathered in the first half of the month.

………

The number of unemployed individuals saying their layoffs were temporary declined in September, which could reflect more people returning to work. Meanwhile, the number of workers who saw their layoffs as permanent rose for the month, a sign workers may be in for long spells of unemployment.

One of the reasons that the unemployment rate is down is that the denominator is shrinking, as people become discouraged, or leave the market because of the unavailability of child care.

To my mind, the employment-population ratio shows a better picture, and the picture is less rosy.

This is the last monthly jobs report before the elections, and I’m pretty sure that both sides will claim that the numbers support them.

Another Thursday, More Bad Economic News

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Unemployment claims remained largely unchanged in the last week, which is to say that it’s still about 30% more than any other report that was not in 2020:

New applications for unemployment benefits in the U.S. fell slightly last week but remained between 800,000 and 900,000 for the fifth straight week, reflecting a labor-market recovery that is losing momentum.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits fell by 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 837,000 in the week ended Sept. 26, the Labor Department said Thursday. In a positive sign, the number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, decreased by 980,000 to about 11.8 million for the week ended Sept. 19. That was the lowest level since March.

The totals for unemployment applications and payments remain well above pre-pandemic peaks but are down significantly from this spring, when the coronavirus pandemic and related shutdowns caused both measures to rise to the highest levels on record back to the 1960s.

………

Thursday’s data was complicated by California pausing the processing of new claims for two weeks. State officials said last month they needed to clear a backlog of nearly 600,000 Californians who have applied for benefits more than 3 weeks earlier, and about 1 million cases where individuals received payments but subsequently modified their claim and are awaiting resolution.

The U.S. Labor Department said Thursday that this week’s national report reflects California’s level during the last week before the pause. Data will be revised at a later date, the government said.

Of more significance, it appears that household income is cratering, which means that the reason that the drop in unemployment claims are flattening out might be that the much touted “recovery” is running out of steam:

A drop in household income and persistently high layoffs are threatening to further slow the U.S. economic recovery, which already appears to be losing momentum as the pandemic continues.

Personal income—what households received from salaries, investments and government aid—fell 2.7% in August as enhanced unemployment checks shrank, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Meanwhile, another 837,000 workers filed for unemployment compensation last week after being recently laid off, the Labor Department said. In total, nearly 12 million workers are receiving unemployment compensation through regular state programs.

The level of weekly jobless claims shows layoffs remain persistent in some industries, and more companies announced cuts this week. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. told employees they will go forward with more than 32,000 job cuts Thursday, after lawmakers were unable to agree on a broad coronavirus-relief package. Insurer Allstate Corp. on Wednesday said it planned to lay off 3,800 employees. Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday announced permanent layoffs for 28,000 theme-park workers who were previously on temporary furlough.

The economy up to now has rebounded more quickly than many economists thought. But with federal aid fading and job growth slowing, consumer spending—the key driver of economic activity in the U.S.—could weaken. Economists believe the recovery is entering into a modest and more grinding phase.

We are coasting on the now expired stimulus and supplemental unemployment payments.

Friday’s jobless rate will be interesting, as will the next few weeks of economic data.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Just Had a Bull Durham Moment

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The Secretary of Commerce has announced a target date of October 5, 2020 to conclude 2020 Census self-response and field data collection operations.

— U.S. Census Bureau (@uscensusbureau) September 28, 2020

Judge Koh Will be Seeing You

It’s never a good idea to call an umpire a c%$# sucker.  As was shown in the classic Baseball Movie Bull Durham.

 If you are a ball player, you are certainly going to get ejected, and likely to get fined.

When a senior administration official does the same thing with a Federal judge, as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has just done with the census, this becomes a setup for a privileged asshole to have a very unpleasant day with a pissed off judge.

Even if he only spends a few hours in the slam waiting for a DoJ motion to bail him out, he will not enjoy himself.

An announcement Monday that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is aiming to end census data collection by Oct. 5 took a federal judge by surprise days after she ordered operations to continue through Oct. 31 to get an accurate population count.

“Breaking news,” a lawyer for the Commerce Department told U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh as a hearing was under way on a lawsuit by civil rights groups claiming that the Trump administration’s move to compress the timeline for the once-a-decade census will result in an undercount of minorities.

The government lawyer pointed the judge to a tweet from the Census Bureau about Ross’s intentions.

Koh said she was “disturbed” that “despite the court’s order,” census supervisors have told field workers to wrap up data collection. The judge added that she’s been “inundated” with emails from field workers making similar allegations.

“Clearly, I need to bring this to a head sooner than I thought,” she said. “And I’m prepared to do it. So let’s do this.” 

(emphasis mine)

I am an engineer, and not a lawyer, dammit,* it seems to me that this is a judge who is very pissed off at what has just happened.

Hopefully, she will take action against the administration officials behind this, and not just the department of commerce.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Initial Claims Remain at Horrific Levels

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Initial unemploument claims rose by 4,000 to 870,000. 

So, still above any weekly claims level that was not in 2020.

If you are wondering why the steep drop and then a flattening out, probably because the aid programs stopped:

The number of applications for unemployment benefits has held steady in September at just under 900,000 a week, as employer uncertainty about the economic recovery six months into the coronavirus pandemic continued to restrain hiring gains.

Jobless claims increased slightly to 870,000 last week from 866,000 a week earlier, according to Thursday’s Labor Department report. The totals remain well above pre-pandemic peaks but are down significantly from nearly seven million in March.

The labor market has added jobs in the prior four months after steep declines in employment at the beginning of the pandemic, helping bring down the jobless rate to 8.4% in August from near 15% in April. But the pace of gains has slowed recently, and persistently elevated jobless claims in September point to continued cooling in the jobs market.

This is not a good economy.

They Say over 200,000. I Think That It Is over ¼ Million

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Excess Deaths is the Gold Standard Here

So, the official death toll from Covid-19 crosses the 200,000 mark. 

The reason that I think that this number is low is that I have looked at the CDC’s excess death figures, and the range there is between 201,917 and 262,877, only the death numbers can be 6-8 weeks late, and these figures only go to the week ending September 5, and deaths have been running at about 10,000 a week. 

Given that we are now entering the busy season for viral spreading, more indoor activity and lowering humidity in those spaces, I think that ½ million dead is not outside of the realm of possibility by year’s end.

This Court Decision Matters

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This has been black letter law since the 3⁄5 compromise was overturned by the fourteenth amendment of the US Constitution in 1868:

A federal court on Thursday rejected President Trump’s order to exclude unauthorized immigrants from population counts that will be used next year to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives, ruling that it was so obviously illegal that a lawsuit challenging the order need not go to a trial.

The court, a three-judge panel in Federal District Court in Manhattan, said Mr. Trump’s proposal exceeded his authority under federal laws governing the census and reapportionment. The specially convened panel said there was no need to consider a second claim in the lawsuit that the president’s order violated the Constitution’s requirement to base apportionment of the House on “the whole number of persons in each state.”

“The merits of the parties’ dispute are not particularly close or complicated,” the judges wrote in granting summary judgment to the plaintiffs, a view that was broadly shared by legal scholars. Two of the judges, Richard C. Wesley and Peter W. Hall, were named to the bench by President George W. Bush. The third, Jesse M. Furman, was nominated by President Barack Obama.

The case involved lawsuits brought by two sets of plaintiffs, one a group of state and local governments and the United States Conference of Mayors, and the second a coalition of advocacy groups and other nongovernmental organizations. The groups argued that Mr. Trump’s order would cause some of them to lose representation in the House and would damage all of them by leading to a less accurate census.

Since the first census was taken in 1790, the number of seats each state holds in the House of Representatives has been based on counts of everyone living in the United States regardless of citizenship or legal status, except for slaves and “Indians not taxed” during the nation’s early years. Former slaves gained citizenship in 1866; all Native Americans did in 1924, although they were counted in regular censuses beginning in 1900.

Mr. Trump tried to scrap that process in July, telling the Commerce Department in a memorandum that the Census Bureau should produce two population counts — one the same as those taken every decade, and the other an estimate of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in each state.

I do not expect that the Supreme Court to rule on this before on the election.

Unemployment Numbers out Today

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This is not a recovery

Initial claims were unchanged at 884,000, which is still really awful:

The number of people seeking and collecting unemployment benefits has remained at historically high levels in recent weeks, a sign the labor-market recovery is losing steam six months after the pandemic struck the U.S.

 Unemployment claims were unchanged at 884,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims fell steadily for weeks after hitting a peak of about 7 million in March, but the pace of descent has slowed and claims remain above the prepandemic record of 695,000.

The number of workers collecting state unemployment benefits also has dropped from highs reached earlier in the pandemic, but is still elevated. So-called continuing claims increased to about 13.4 million at the end of August.

………

The increase in the number of job postings, a real-time measure of labor-market activity, has markedly slowed since late July, and last week stood about 20% below 2019 levels, according to data from job-search site Indeed.com.

And remember, the pump priming of the original aid bill has ended, and Mitch McConnell has no interests in passing another bill, he just want to score political points, and as the heating season begins, and internal becomes drier, Covid will be more contagious.

We are f%$#ed.

This is a Big Deal

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A federal judge has issued an injunction preventing the Census Bureau from terminating operations while a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s attempt to sabotage the decennial count.

This is not a victory, it’s just a hold until the suit can progress, but it does imply that there is a reasonable chance of their prevailing:

A federal judge has ordered the US Census Bureau for the time being to stop following a plan that would have had it winding down operations in order to finish the 2020 census at the end of September.

The federal judge in San Jose issued a temporary restraining order on Saturday against the Census Bureau and the Commerce Department, which oversees the agency.

The order stops the Census Bureau from winding down operations until a court hearing is held on 17 September. The once-a-decade head count of every US resident helps determine how $1.5tn in federal funding is distributed and how many congressional seats each state gets in a process known as apportionment.

The temporary restraining order was requested by a coalition of cities, counties and civil rights groups that had sued the Census Bureau, demanding it restore its previous plan for finishing the census at the end of October, instead of using a revised plan to end operations at the end of September. The coalition had argued the earlier deadline would cause the Census Bureau to overlook minority communities in the census, leading to an inaccurate count.

The September hearing should be interesting.

Unemployment Rate Falls

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The Scariest Job Chart Ever

The official U-3 unemployment rate fell by 1.8% to 8.4% and the number of unemployed fell by 2.8 million to 13.6 million.

It’s undeniably good numbers, particularly since the employment/population ratio, which is hard to rat-f%$#, has risen as well.

Note that the numbers are from 2 weeks ago though, just 2 weeks after the $600 unemployment supplement ended.

From a political perspective, both sides are going to try to make political hay over this, and the media, being what it is, will absolutely represent it as a “Both Sides” thing.

New Initial Claims Today

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Unemployment claims fell to below 1 million again, but the actual adjusted number rose by 8000.

The fall is because the DOL changed its seasonal adjustment formula for this report.

Also note that Pandemic Unemployment Assistance(PUA) initial claims for self-employed and gig workers, rose by over 150,000 to 759K.

I know that people dismiss the possibility that eh “Professionals” at the Department of Labor are bending to the political winds blowing from 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, but every one of these adjustments seems to favor the Trump administration:

Note: The DOL has changed their seasonal adjustment method, so to compare to the previous week, we need to use the NSA data.  See Technical Note on Weekly Unemployment Claims

The Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA) claims increased to 833,352 from 825,761 the previous week. These are directly comparable since the Seasonal Adjustment Factor was identical for both weeks.

The DOL reported:

In the week ending August 29, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 881,000, a decrease of 130,000 from the previous week’s revised level. The previous week’s level was revised up by 5,000 from 1,006,000 to 1,011,000. The 4-week moving average was 991,750, a decrease of 77,500 from the previous week’s revised average.
The previous week’s average was revised up by 1,250 from 1,068,000 to 1,069,250.


emphasis added

The previous week was revised up.

This does not include the 759,482 initial claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) that was up from 607,808 the previous week.

I’m not saying that the DOL is juicing the numbers, the seasonal adjustment needed to be  ……… well ……… adjusted, but it does seem that the DOL is spinning the numbers.

Still Over 1 Million

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Initial unemployment claims fell by 98,000 to 1,006,000 last week.

I expect the employment to population levels not to reach where they were in February for at least a year.

Also, I expect the effects of the termination of the supplementary unemployment payments sooner rather than later, which will further slow down the economy:

Unemployment claims fell slightly last week but remained historically high, signaling layoffs continue as the coronavirus continues to hamper the economic recovery.

New applications for unemployment benefits ticked down to one million in the week ended Aug. 22, the Labor Department said Thursday. Initial unemployment claims remain well below the recent peak of about seven million in March but are far higher than pre-pandemic levels of about 200,000 claims a week.

The number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, edged down to about 14.5 million for the week ended Aug. 15. So-called continuing claims, which are released with a one-week lag, hit a high of nearly 25 million this spring but have declined in recent weeks, a sign companies are bringing back workers.

“We’re seeing gradual improvement, but we really need to underscore the word ‘gradual’ here. We’re only inching along in terms of the labor market’s recovery,” said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities.

In a separate report released Thursday, the Commerce Department revised its estimate of second-quarter economic growth, saying gross domestic product fell at a 31.7% annual rate, slightly less than its earlier estimate of 32.9%, due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Those numbers are not just catastrophic, they are apocalyptic.

Over 1 Million!!!!!

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Initial jobless claims rose to 1,106,000 last week, up from 971,000 the week before.

This is the first increase in initial claims since the Covid shutdown began.

This is not going to be a short duration recession.  We have over 15 million continuing claims, up from about 2 million before the shutdown, and an increasing number of the layoffs have become permanent.

Then we have something like 30 million Americans facing foreclosure or eviction.

This will not be a “V” shaped recovery:

New applications for unemployment benefits rose last week after a series of declines, another sign the labor market’s recovery is cooling amid continuing disruptions because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits rose by 135,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.1 million in the week ended Aug. 15, the Labor Department said Thursday.

The report followed others from the government and private firms showing that job gains slowed in July from June, job postings fell this week for the first time since April and several companies are planning more layoffs.

Still, the data show the job market is improving, though more slowly than in the spring.The number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, fell to about 14.8 million for the week ended Aug. 8. That marked the lowest number on benefit rolls since April. And nationally, new hiring is more than offsetting job cuts.

………

In addition to regular state claims, Thursday’s report showed the number of people applying for special federal pandemic assistance also rose in the week that ended Aug. 15. That program is open to self-employed and other workers who aren’t eligible for state programs. In early August, more than 11 million people were receiving benefits through that program.

These numbers are catastrophic, and unprecedented in post war labor statistics.

There are way too many people, and this coverage, are whistling past the grave yard.

Under 1 Million

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The Trend is Encouraging

Initial jobless claims fell below 1 million for the first time in five months.

The number is bad, it’s no longer twice than the pre-Covid record:

U.S. unemployment claims fell below one million last week for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic struck in March, as the deeply wounded labor market continues to regain some footing.

New applications for unemployment benefits dropped to a seasonally adjusted 963,000 in the week ended Aug. 8, the Labor Department said Thursday, marking the second weekly reduction in filings. The number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover the majority of workers, also decreased to about 15.5 million at the beginning of August.

 But both figures remain well above even the worst figures before the pandemic struck, with the number of people receiving benefits more than double the 6.6 million reached in 2009.

Unemployment remains elevated as other measures of the economy, including consumer spending, also lag behind levels from before the coronavirus hit. An increase in coronavirus infections across much of the country continues to threaten economic gains as states put in place new restrictions aimed at containing the pandemic.

………

The drop in claims could also reflect waning fiscal support by the government, Ms. Pollak said. The late-July expiration of an extra $600 a week in federal jobless benefits—added in March under a virus-relief package—puts much less money in unemployed individuals’ pockets, possibly discouraging them from seeking benefits.

Without the $600 weekly boost, payments dropped to the level set by states, which averaged about $330 a week for the 12 months through June, according to the Labor Department.

The downside to all of this is that more places, and businesses, are backing off from reopening because of new outbreaks, and the programs that cushioned the impact, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s bullsh%$ executive orders, have shut down.

The countervailing winds are strengthening.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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If good data is collected and made public, then Trump cannot declare victory, and DHS has been politicized by Trump’s Evil Minions™, and mismanaging a dire situation is really their only skill set.

The purpose of the switch was to give the Donald Trump to :

Public release of hospital data about the coronavirus pandemic has slowed to a crawl, one month after the federal government ordered states to report it directly to the Department of Health and Human Services and bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Key indicators, such as estimates of the portion of inpatient beds occupied by Covid-19 patients, are lagging by a week or more, making it harder for citizens and local officials to get a handle on how the pandemic is progressing and for agencies to allocate supplies of antiviral drugs and personal protective equipment, public-health experts say.

The decision to switch data reporting in the middle of a public-health crisis was reckless, researchers and former public-health officials say.

“The transition has been a disaster,” as hospitals typically take time to adjust to new data systems, said Jeffrey Engel, senior adviser to the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, an association that represents state public-health officials. “What HHS said was that the CDC was not nimble enough and couldn’t handle new data elements, and that’s simply not true.”

Chaos is job won.

Still Over 10%

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Obviously, this is movement in the right direction, though there are still indications that the BLS survey has not handled the unique circumstances of the pandemic. (There are also some more tinfoil hat possibilities, but Very Serious People don’t discuss such things)

Hiring increased in July for the third straight month, though overall gains have yet to restore half of the U.S. jobs lost due to the coronavirus pandemic.

July’s addition of 1.8 million jobs and a lower unemployment rate of 10.2%, after a peak of nearly 15% in April, showed the U.S. economy continued to mend during the summer coronavirus surge. It also reflected how far the economy has to go to overcome the shock from the pandemic and related lockdowns.

The U.S. now has about 13 million fewer jobs than in February, the month before the coronavirus hit the U.S. economy, the Labor Department said on Friday. Unemployment remains historically high. Before the coronavirus drove the U.S. into a deep recession this year, the unemployment rate was hovering around a 50-year low of 3.5%.

“We’re in a pretty strong rebound,” said David Berson, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. chief economist. “But the downturn was so big—the hole that was dug was so deep—that it will still take probably at least a couple of years to dig ourselves out.”

It might take longer than that, since supplemental unemployment benefits have ended, and eviction moratoriums are coming to an end.

Still anyone who calls double-digit unemployment good news need their head examined.