The weekly unemployment claims data came out strong, once again. The news companies are ignoring the data with all the effort that they can muster. The headline number is the seasonally adjusted (SA) first-time unemployment (FTU) claims data. A second number that should receive some headlines is the SA Continuing Claims (CC) data. The problem is that the seasonal factors used to convert the NSA data to the SA data changes by week, month, and year, as well as between the FTU and CC values. When seasonally adjusted data from different seasons are compared a FACT (False Assertion Considered to be True) is created. A major FACT is that the SA FTU streak has been on-going for over 2 years. This is an economic urban legend. There were numerous times during the "streak" where they value could have been reported over 300,000 claims - especially during Thanksgiving week.  So what happened this week?

The First Time Claims number was recorded close to 200,000 Claims, again. This is the non-seasonally adjusted data. Last week's value was revised up from 194, 557 to 195,214. If a seasonally adjusted value of under 300,000 claims is good what is a non-seasonally adjusted value of lower than 200,000 claims? Answer: Ignored. This week the value edged up to a recorded value of 206,868 and a reported value of 234,000.

The Seasonally Adjusted First-time claims data could have been reported lower than it was reported.  The difference between 231,000 and 234,000 is not that much of a difference. What is important to understand is that the official SA FTU value was lower than any time this century for the third week of May. The first-time claims data feeds into the continuing claims data.

The Continuing Claims data  was recorded at 1.603 million claims. This is an important number to understand because the continuing claims data can  give some insight into what to expect from the U-3 unemployment level that will be reported for the May Jobs Report. The May 12th collection date for the weekly claims data coincides with the collection date for the Jobs Report.

The Continuing Claims Data could have been reported under 1.7 million claims. The non-seasonally adjusted data has rarely been below 1.6 million claims. Normally the NSA CC value hits its annual low during the first week of October or the first week of November.

This data was seriously good. There will be weekly variation until this fall.

It's the economy.