First-time Unemployment Claims Up for Fifth Consecutive Week

The Department of Labor has been spinning Unemployment Claims FACTs (False Assertions Considered to be True) for years. This column has been debunking these FACTs for almost as long as they have been making them. The seasonal factors used to create the seasonally adjusted (SA) data from the non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) data  are the foundation of these FACTs. Seasonal factors change by category. Seasonal Factors change from week to week, month to month, season to season, and year to year. Comparing seasonally adjusted data from different seasons is disingenuous. Promoting as seasonally adjusted streak is spurious.

How badly do you need a streak if you have to manufacture one? One of the earliest articles written by this column focusing on the First-time Claims FACTs was written during October of 2014. "First time Unemployment Claim the FACT that this is the Best Report since 2000 - Not True"  compared all the data upon which they based their statement and found it to be false.It was known that no streak existed when the Department of Labor first made the claim that the streak was at 63 weeks. The streak was promoted for the first time in the March 17, 2016 report when it was promoted that the streak was 54 consecutive weeks.  When that FACT was proposed this column produced an article showing that they were fabricating the FACT by using seasonally adjusted data. Had they used the seasonal factors from the Second week of April 2007 to convert the NSA Data to the SA data the second week of April 2016 then "Streak" would have ended before it even started.

This column set out systematically debunking the First-time Unemployment Claims Streak months ago. There was a four part series that compared the seasonal factors for the past 16 years for each week of the year. The first column debunked the FACT that the streak began during March of 2015. The second column established that the streak started after  June 6, 2015. The streak began after September 5, 2015. The streak began after  January 16, 2016. Subtract 50 weeks from whatever the authors of the weekly report state.

So, what happened this week? The streak stretched to 37 weeks.

First-time Unemployment Claims are up for the fifth consecutive week. We are still hovering around 16 year non-seasonally adjusted lows. This week we are slightly below last year's level. We did not experience the surge 3 weeks ago that we normally see nor did we see the drop we normally experience two weeks ago. The first-time unemployment claims may be low due to elevated levels of people working two jobs. They may also be low because participation is near historically low levels.

The First-time Claims Level could have been reported higher or lower than they were reported. The seasonal factor data  for the fifth week of October is limited by the number years with five Saturdays in October. The value could have been reported between 262,000 and 268,000. The data is still good and still is under 300,000.

The Continuing Claims number is just under 1.8 Million - Great by historic measures. The data keeps bumping up and down around 1.8 million claims. This number is artificially low because the NSA FTU value is artificially low. We had substantially higher participation and an even lower unemployment  rate during October of 2000.

If someone is willing to go to this much trouble to propogate a FACT regarding unemployment claims what would they do to manufacture jobs numbers tomorrow?