373,000 Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, more than anticipated.
The prior week’s level, a pandemic-era low, was revised higher.
The market expected 350,000 on the headline initial claims print, so the latest “real-time” read on the labor market counted as a disappointment at the margins. The four-week moving average fell slightly, to 394,500 (figure below).
Continuing claims were 3.339 million in the week to June 26. That was a touch lower than estimates.
As a quick reminder, headline initial claims posted a sizable drop in the prior week after two consecutive weeks of elevated prints (you can see them clearly in the figure above).
The “anomalous” uptick in the week to June 12 (and the stubbornness on display the following week) raised questions about whether the “normalization” process had run its course. This week’s slight uptick (figure below) doesn’t provide much in the way of incremental information.
Obviously, the debate is ongoing about the extent to which enhanced benefits are contributing to labor market frictions. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance claims fell 15,000 last week. Ongoing PUA and PEUC claims were 5,824,831 and 4,908,107, respectively, in the week to June 19.
Wednesday’s JOLTS data showed the yawning gap between vacancies and hires persisted at the end of May, and anecdotal evidence from PMIs tells a similar story.
The bottom line remains the same: It’ll likely be October before it’s possible to draw anything like definitive conclusions on what the post-pandemic labor market “really” looks like in the US. For now, we’re just staring at a funhouse mirror.
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