Claims And Cuts

For the better part of two months, recurring jobless claims in the US served as an offset of sorts for persistently subdued initial claims. To briefly recapitulate, market observers spent an inordinate amount of time during the first half of 2023 parsing every weekly claims release for evidence of an impending recession. That effort became torturously belabored and ultimately came to nothing. There was no recession and by mid-October, initial claims were printing new "since January" lows. And