{"id":368,"date":"2010-03-11T10:29:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T15:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intuitiveinvestor.com\/web\/?p=368"},"modified":"2018-08-21T09:01:39","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T13:01:39","slug":"treading-water-jobless-claims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2010\/03\/11\/treading-water-jobless-claims\/","title":{"rendered":"Treading water &#8211; jobless claims"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">This morning weekly initial jobless claims fell by 6,000.\u00a0 A gaggle of economists had expected a drop of 9,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Analysis<\/strong>:\u00a0 Another week, another weak jobless number.\u00a0 The economy just is not adding jobs at this point and the only reason that the unemployment rate seems to be falling is because the number of people who have given up looking for work has increased.\u00a0 Additionally, these data are always revised, so an improvement in the initial jobless claims figure of just 6,000 on a U.S. population base of over 300 million is basically a statistical error.\u00a0 However, in all data that tracks changes (i.e. calculus) both magnitude (the number of claims) and direction (up or down) are important.\u00a0 So the shift in the last two weeks from &#8220;negative&#8221; numbers to &#8220;positive&#8221; numbers <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">is<\/span> noteworthy.\u00a0 Yet, it&#8217;s my feeling that until there is movement on the unemployment rate, U.S. consumer confidence will remain sagged.\u00a0 That, in turn, tempers consumer spending and the aggregate economy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Somewhat positively, the number of claims anticipated by economists was fairly close to the actual number.\u00a0 This may mean that the economy is becoming less volatile.\u00a0 To make a definitive statement to that effect requires at least several more weeks of data, though.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Importance grade:<\/strong> 7; this remains an important number to track because of the potential for positive improvement in the number.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This morning weekly initial jobless claims fell by 6,000.\u00a0 A gaggle of economists had expected a drop of 9,000. Analysis:\u00a0 Another week, another weak jobless number.\u00a0 The economy just is not adding jobs at this point and the only reason that the unemployment rate seems to be falling is because the number of people who [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}