Uptick in unemployment claims?

[Amelia]

Would you prefer the media to hype any good news and soft pedal any bad so as to increase consumer confidence and encourage more spending and thus possibly improve the economy?

 

[Claudette]

I'm waiting to see how UE does when they downsize the Army and Marines.

Be plenty of vets on the UE lines.

Like to see em soft pedal that.

 

[Amelia]

That's gonna complicate the Dream Act discussion.

 

[jaybags]

its a moderate uptick and under 400k, which is considered tolerable.

 

[Amelia]

The AP's version of the story, as relayed in the Washington Post:

Weekly applications for unemployment benefits jump to 399,000 because of seasonal layoffs - The Washington Post

Applications for weekly unemployment benefits spiked last week, largely because companies let go of thousands of workers after the holiday season.

Weekly applications rose by 24,000 to a seasonally adjusted 399,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s the highest level in six weeks.

Economists said such a jump is typical in early January and downplayed the increase. It followed three months of steady declines that brought applications to their lowest level in more than three years. And weekly unemployment claims have been below 400,000 in nine of the past 10 weeks.

That’s a “clear indication that the pace of layoffs has slowed,” said Steven Wood, chief economist at Insight Economics.

....

 

[waltky]

Job market seems to be turnin' around...

More Americans Quitting Than Being Laid Off, Stats Show
4/13/12 - Take this job and shove it?

That's the title of an old country chestnut, written by David Allan Coe in 1978, and most famously covered by Johnny Paycheck. Fast forward 34 years and it's a tune, in increasingly strident fashion, being sung by more and more Americans workers. More employees are voluntarily leaving their jobs than those who are being asked to leave by their employers, according to new government data. Why Americans are feeling the urge to leave a job in this economy seems to be a mystery. The U.S. Labor Department just announced that the number of U.S. workers applying for jobless benefits spiked to its highest levels since January (to 380,000, the agency reports).

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the unemployment rate for March was 8.2% (with many private economists saying the real jobless rate is much higher than that). So what's up with the "quitters"? In actuality, Americans have been leaving jobs on a regular basis, although it hasn't received much notice in the media. According to the government's Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, the "quits rate" (the term the government uses for workers who leave a job on their own) rose to 2.1 million - 300,000 above the 1.8 million the government recorded at the height of the recession in January 2009. The most recent high was 2.9 million American workers leaving their jobs in December 2007, before the economic tsunami hit.

Taken together with the survey's "separations" figure (the term Uncle Sam uses for workers who leave a job either via retirement, "voluntary quits," and involuntary layoffs), 51% of such employment separations came from employees walking away from their jobs. That's up from 49.8% in February, and signals a milestone for the survey - more Americans are quitting their jobs than being laid off. The bump-up in "job quits" may be due to signs of a more robust U.S economy, with consumer confidence, unemployment and housing values all ahead of where they stood in April 2011.

But some economists aren't so sure. "Quits go hand-in-hand with consumer confidence and for the first time of the recovery, quits represent a greater percentage of total separations than do involuntary layoffs," explains Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group, in a research note first published by CNBC's Fast Money on Friday. "(But) careful analysis of February's JOLTS data leaves us scratching our heads and hoping March was an anomaly."

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[code1211]

Would you prefer the media to hype any good news and soft pedal any bad so as to increase consumer confidence and encourage more spending and thus possibly improve the economy?

I would prefer accurate reporting of the news without the constant shill for the Obama campaign.

 

[FloridaGirl]

Not sure how much you can trust some numbers....