jobs

Which One of These Doesn’t Look Like the Other

A very surprising jobs report this morning. The economy added 2.5mm jobs last month!

Why is this so surprising? All the other data says the economy lost jobs last month. This graph shows the number of new jobless claims, the change in continuing claims, and then the change in jobs reported by the employment report.

Comparison of Jobs Data each month

The May Job’s number looks very odd compared to the rest of the data. It could just be some “rounding error” from the huge numbers last month.

Please note this survey was completed the week of May 12th. That means this was finish BEFORE ANY REOPENING. This is not about a recovery. This is about something else. I have a theory which I’ll discuss on Monday.

By Christopher Schwarz, ago

Reopening Appears in Continuing Claims

Another 2.1 million filings for unemployment today. This is still 3 times more than any time before the COVID recession. However, the more interesting number is continuing claims.

Continuing Claims for 2020

You can see for the first time since the start of the recession claims fell by about 3 million. Since no one has run out of unemployment benefits yet, these are people going back to work.

Note this still gives the US 21 million people getting unemployment. The prior highest total was about 6.5 million during the financial crisis, so this is still a huge number.

This will be a number to watch going forward for the recovery.

By Christopher Schwarz, ago