excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 28,550
- 57,760
- 2,290
In spite of ginned up polling that tries to claim the opposite.
Just stop listening to and reading the MSM.
Just stop listening to and reading the MSM.
Continued weekly claims for unemployment insurance benefits fell to 1.827 million, the lowest since September 2024, according to the Labor Department today. These continued claims track the total number of people who’d initially applied for unemployment insurance at least a week earlier and are still claiming unemployment insurance because they still haven’t found a job
They have been zigzagging lower since their recent peak in July 2025 (1.968 million) and are down by 141,000 from that peak.
These continued claims are relatively low in a historic context. Over the past five decades, it’s only during the tight labor market in 2018 and 2019 and in the years of the labor shortages in 2021 and 2022, that the level was lower. But back then, nonfarm payrolls were quite a bit smaller. It indicates that people remain on unemployment insurance rolls a little longer than in 2022-2024 during the labor shortages, and in 2018-2019 during the tight labor market, but not as long as they did at any time in the prior decades.
This is administrative data collected from state unemployment agencies. It is not survey-based data. Laid-off people who still haven’t found a job filed these unemployment insurance claims at state unemployment agencies, which then report them to the US Department of Labor by the weekly deadline, which then combines the data and publishes it.
Initial applications for unemployment benefits (“initial claims”) in the week through Saturday declined to 209,000, which is historically low.
This weekly data is notoriously volatile as some states might not get their claims data submitted before the deadline, in which case the data is included in the following week. When a big state does that, it moves the needle, low one week, high the next week.
...
They have been zigzagging lower since their recent peak in July 2025 (1.968 million) and are down by 141,000 from that peak.
These continued claims are relatively low in a historic context. Over the past five decades, it’s only during the tight labor market in 2018 and 2019 and in the years of the labor shortages in 2021 and 2022, that the level was lower. But back then, nonfarm payrolls were quite a bit smaller. It indicates that people remain on unemployment insurance rolls a little longer than in 2022-2024 during the labor shortages, and in 2018-2019 during the tight labor market, but not as long as they did at any time in the prior decades.
This is administrative data collected from state unemployment agencies. It is not survey-based data. Laid-off people who still haven’t found a job filed these unemployment insurance claims at state unemployment agencies, which then report them to the US Department of Labor by the weekly deadline, which then combines the data and publishes it.
Initial applications for unemployment benefits (“initial claims”) in the week through Saturday declined to 209,000, which is historically low.
This weekly data is notoriously volatile as some states might not get their claims data submitted before the deadline, in which case the data is included in the following week. When a big state does that, it moves the needle, low one week, high the next week.
...
