Moneybox

Good News In New Jobless Claims

Another bit of good data for the American economy comes from today’s initial unemployment claims: “In the week ending December 17, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 364,000, a decrease of 4,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 368,000. The 4-week moving average was 380,250, a decrease of 8,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 388,250.”

Now we’re coming out of the bottom of an incredibly horrible recession so to rapidly return to full employment we would need several quarters in a row of historic boom. That is not what we’re looking at in the data. But what we have seen in the October, November, and now December numbers is a series of months in which conditions have definitely been improving.