First time claims for unemployment, not-seasonally-adjusted, have now averaged just under 298,000 per week in the last four weeks, the first time that's happened under Obama. Today's weekly report of 280,502 is the third in a row below 300,000 and only the fifth time in 4.5 years under Obama that weekly first time claims have been under that level.
The report is here.
The seasonally-adjusted figure at 332,000 doesn't quite capture the current facts on the ground and exaggerates what's going on by over 11% in the latest report. Even so, annualized we're looking at between 15.5 million claims per year to 17.2 million in the last month, conditions which should make it possible to make real improvements in hiring. Under George Bush claims never got below 16.2 million per year.
But there appears to be no driver for jobs anywhere in this depressed economy, just a driver for a golf ball in the hands of the president.
