New claims for unemployment insurance rose 15K last week from 561K to 576K. This is not going well. This is the second week in a row that we have seen a rise and its beginning to flatten the overall trajectory.
Staying anywhere in the 500Ks makes for a terrible economy. It indicates that we are still loosing jobs at a fairly rapid clip. I had hoped that we would return to job growth in the next month or two. This seems nearly impossible now.
What it is looking like to me is that the net effect of moving auto layoffs forward did in fact make it seem as if the overall trajectory of new claims was better than it was. This was a view I was critical of at the time. It appears I was wrong.
At least I hope I am wrong and this is not the beginning of a compete stall out or worse an upward trend. Most of the data seems to be moving in the right way. The financial crisis qua financial crises is over. The economy is set up for a recovery. If it doesn’t come soon we’ve got some deeper problem on our hands.
As always, the long view.
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