Continuing Claims Hover Near 17-Month Highs, California Jobless Soar

After last week’s dramatic ‘adjustment’ to the last year’s worth of jobless claims data, the picture is a little more grave than the pre-revision data had proclaimed.

Initial claims were expected to rise from 228k to 235k in the latest week but actually printed worse at 239k…

Source: Bloomberg

Continuing claims dropped very modestly like last week (from 1.823mm to 1.81mm) but remain near the highest since Dec 2021.

One look at the ‘new’ initial claims data above shows the last two months have basically been a non-stop increase in initial claims (as we would have expected from the layoff news).

California dominated all other states with the largest jump in jobless claims while Ohio saw initial claims decline…

Finally, as we noted earlier, the pervasive deterioration in continuing claims data across US states is consistent with a recession beginning very soon.