Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (09/01/2011)

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: Employment and Training Administration, Department of Labor

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE WEEKLY CLAIMS REPORT

SEASONALLY ADJUSTED DATA

In the week ending August 27, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 409,000, a decrease of 12,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 421,000. The 4-week moving average was 410,250, an increase of 1,750 from the previous week's revised average of 408,500.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.0 percent for the week ending August 20, unchanged from the prior week's revised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending August 20 was 3,735,000, a decrease of 18,000 from the preceding week's revised level of 3,753,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,726,000, a decrease of 3,250 from the preceding week's revised average of 3,729,250.

Read more: http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/ui/eta20111279.htm

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409,000 - down 12,000 from last week, but still over 400,000.

[Beacool]

1. In other words, the unemployment figures still suck.

:-(

[stockholmer]

2. Initial Unemployment Claims Post Above 400k For 20th Time In Last 21 Weeks (last week # revised up)

Source: US Department of Labor and Zero Hedge

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/another-upward-revision-strike-factors-are-removed-leaves-initial-claims-posts-above-400k-19th-

Following last week's somewhat twilight zone-like Verizon-strike-driven confusion, today's initial claims report (once again revised upwards) makes for 20 of the last 21 weeks above 400k and its highest (yet to be revised upwards) since 7/15. The four-week average, oft cited to smooth this revision-prone series, rose for the first time since 6/24. While initial claims was a very small beat of expectations (at 409k versus exp 410k), continuing claims (which was rather ubiquitously revised up once again) missed expectations by a rather wide margin coming at 3735k versus 3681k expected (though some will claim still a drop from last week's upwardly revised 3753k but let's just wait til next week's upward revision before we celebrate that). Extended and EUC ticked up just a little from 3637.8k to 3675.9k but remains more than 1.2mm lower than a year ago - still fewer comfortable consumers to spend.



Of course the market's newly re-programmed response of worse is better has kicked into high gear as ES drifts higher on weak economic data.



Read more: http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/ui/eta20111279.htm

[xchrom]

3. Recommend

[Yo_Mama]

4. yeah, we just do not make much in the way of progress on this one

ADP didn't look that hot either. Did you see the very low rate of added jobs for large corporations?

[stockholmer]

5. some major foundations for this were laid in the 1990's with NAFTA, etc

The strip-mining of the USA industrial base has been staggering in the last 45 years (85%+ lost) and exploded in the 1990's and 2000's.

The public was fed a line of disinfo under Clinton (to sell NAFTA) that the coming new high tech economy would create enough jobs to replace any losses in the manufacturing sector. The late 1990's tech bubble only served to re-enforce this paradigm, and also allowed the repeal of Glass-Steagall and culminated in the horrid Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, both of which were pushed through under the steerage of the Clinton/Rubin/Greenspan troika. When the tech bubble burst, the Fed and the US politicians, in collusion with the banksters, simply created another bubble (the mortgage bubble), which finally burst in 2007/2008.

What they did not tell the US citizens (who still, in the large majority, did not prepare adequately for the tech jobs via college and adult re-training) was that tech sector would fail to replicate the huge number of traditional jobs lost (due to tech sector's scales of ever-increasing efficiency and automation).

Furthermore, the 3rd world, especially Asia, has now had 15 plus years of gearing up an entire generation to handle the customer care needs of the US multi-nationals for a mere fraction of the labour cost, so that even these low-paying tech-related jobs are now being shipped overseas.

China is now in the process of delivering the coup d' grace via shrewd business models that demand a Western firm to not only outsource manufacturing to them, but also to import the technology to actually design the products themselves that were built in the factories originally erected to simply provide the labour.

[Yo_Mama]

6. Nice summation

One of the reasons that I think we do not address the underlying causes of our economic woes is that there has been far too much "bipartisanship" about all this.

We need to be honest about what hasn't worked - and change it.

[stockholmer]

7. instead of the phrase 'bipartisanship' (which has positive overtones to so many in the US) why not

call it what it truly is.......... continuity of agenda.

Republicans and Democrats are 2 sides of the same corporatist coin, the US political 2 party system is a pure false-paradigmical sham.

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The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.

- Carrol Quigley, Tragedy and Hope (1966)