Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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I have often used to space to harangue news outlets for making too much of relatively small changes in weekly unemployment insurance (UI) claims. After all, it is just one week’s worth of data. The numbers are erratic and subject to substantial revision.
Still, I would have thought the decline in claims reported yesterday would have gotten some more attention. It wasn’t so much the single week decline that was newsworthy as the fact that the 4-week moving average, 367,250 was very close to the low for the recovery that we saw back in February.
More rapid job growth usually does follow declines in UI claims, although the relationship is far from exact. Nonetheless, the new claims seen over the last month is consistent with a much more rapid pace of job growth than we have been seeing. My bet for July is now in excess of 160k with some upward revision to the June number.
That’s still not really worth celebrating given our jobs deficit, but it is a step in the right direction.