Friday, January 20, 2012

Unemployment: Turning a Corner?

The unemployment report that is most commonly tracked is the monthly jobs figure put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But there's also a weekly report of new unemployment claims, issued by the Labor Department. It's more susceptible to statistical hiccups than the monthly report, which is why it's commonly expressed as a four-week rolling average.

But there might be something important happening with this week's figure, which shows the number of initial unemployment claims at 352,000. That's the lowest that number has been since April 2008, and represented a drop of 50,000 from the previous week's figure. The picture's even brighter here in New Jersey, where new filers for unemployment fell by 4,667, the fourth-largest drop of any state.

It's too soon to tell whether that trend will continue, or even if the number of new claims will stay that low next week. But it's worth noting that last week's drop also caused the four-week moving average to fall to its second-lowest point in the past three years.

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