Initial US jobless claims printed well above estimates in figures released Thursday.

Taken at face value, that’d constitute one more in a series of data points suggesting the world’s largest economy is cooling and the labor market normalizing (or trying to normalize, anyway).

Earlier this week, BLS figures suggested there were far fewer open jobs on the last business day of February than economists projected. A day later, ADP said private sector businesses added 145,000 jobs in March, 60,000 fewer than expected. And ISM’s manufacturing and services sector surveys both evidenced a deceleration.

With that in mind, Thursday’s 228,000 initial claims print appeared to validate sundry slowdown narratives when juxtaposed with the 200,000 consensus. Moreover, the prior week was revised sharply higher, and by “sharply” I mean from 198,000 all the way up to 246,000 (and from 1.689 million to 1.817 million for continuing claims).

Hold the hyperbole.

Starting with Thursday’s release, the data reflected a change in the methodology for seasonally adjusting the figures. For the purposes of the pandemic period, the government used an additive seasonal adjustment factor to avoid the pitfalls of using a multiplicative method “in the presence of a large level shift in a time series.” Once those large shifts faded, the seasonal adjustment models reverted back to the multiplicative method. Here’s what the BLS had to say on Thursday:

While the pandemic period remains within the five-year revision period, the UI series will be treated as a hybrid adjustment. The most volatile economic period of the pandemic, including the period running from March 2020 to June 2021, was not revised and will continue to be based on additive adjustments. Before and after these periods, both series are adjusted using multiplicative adjustments. For consistency, the published seasonal factors are presented as multiplicative with additive factors converted to implicit multiplicative factors and will not be subject to revision. Now that the pandemic impacts on the UI claims series are clearer, modifications have been made to the outlier sets in the seasonal adjustment models for both of the claims series. This led to larger than usual revisions during many weeks over the last five years, however, these changes should provide a more accurate picture of claims levels and patterns for both initial and continued claims.

You can take that for whatever it’s worth, but statistical context mattered on Thursday. And that’s the context.

With that out of the way, the figures now look quite a bit different. For example, the four-week moving average for initial claims stands at 237,750. Before the revisions, it was 198,250 last week. In a further testament to the impact of the methodology change, this week’s four-week average actually represented a decrease from the prior week’s revised average. The 198,250 I mentioned is now 242,000. Actual, unadjusted initial claims fell to 207,000 from 224,200 the prior week.

Simply put: It’s not possible to parse this week’s claims figures in real-time. There were already all manner of questions about what was behind claims’ stubborn refusal to budge from near record lows amid the most acute bout of layoffs since 2009, and now any sort of comprehensive assessment will need to incorporate the new numbers.

Of course, the simple answer to why claims weren’t higher is just that there are still nearly 10 million job openings across the US economy, which suggests there are 1.67 jobs for every American counted as officially unemployed. But there are other answers too. For those interested, I broached this subject last week in “Beware The Latent Surge In Jobless Claims.”

More useful, perhaps, than a newly-revised government series, was the update from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which showed that job cuts in 2023 now stand at 270,416. That ranks as the seventh-highest total three months into a calendar year on record.

“We know companies are approaching 2023 with caution, though the economy is still creating jobs. With rate hikes continuing and companies reining in costs, the large-scale layoffs we are seeing will likely continue,” Andrew Challenger said Thursday, adding that tech “is leading all industries” with more than 100,000 announced cuts this year.

That figure for tech (actually 102,391) puts the sector on track to top 2001 for the most annual job cuts. For context, tech announced 168,395 and 131,294 cuts in 2001 and 2002, respectively, according to Challenger.

So, it’s possible that this year’s tech cuts will surpass those seen during the dot-com bust by mid-year. Part of that is a function of how rapidly tech hired during the pandemic, though.

Tech cuts this year already exceed those announced for all of 2022. YTD (i.e., compared to Q1 of last year), tech job cuts are up 38,487%.