Initial US jobless claims rose a second week, handily topping estimates in the process, according to Thursday’s only notable US macro release.

The headline initial filers print, 223,000, was easily ahead of the 210,000 consensus, and counted as the highest print since early last month.

Of course, “high”‘s a relative term when we’re talking about initial claims. This series hasn’t consistently evidenced anything concerning in a very, very long time. Each and every nascent spike subsequently proved to be a false alarm, and efforts to extract a recession signal from fleeting upticks always came to naught.

The 20,000 cumulative increase over the last two releases isn’t nothin’, so to speak, but it comes on the heels of an 11-month low print. The four-week moving average moved up slightly, to a still-subdued 213,500.

I don’t want to belabor the point, but how many times over the last two or so years did your favorite “Finance Twitter” account suggest claims were on the brink of a sharp upward inflection? For the terminal users among you, how many times did one of Bloomberg’s “MLIV” bloggers walk you through a laborious statistical analysis of, for example, state-level data, in the course of suggesting all’s not well if you “know what to look for”?

Market participants, like Trump supporters, have a tendency to disbelieve the idea that someone might just outright lie to them, but… well, what do you want me to say? If your job (or “job,” with scare quotes, to cover professional tweeters) is to create engaging, macro-themed content every day, you’re going to have to make some sh-t up every now and again, otherwise you’ll run out of stuff to say. So, yes, a meaningful portion of the macro-market “analysis” you peruse online every day is, for all intents and purposes, made up.

Anyway, continuing claims for the week to January 11 were 1.899 million. That was easily ahead of consensus and in fact topped the highest call from the 15 economists who bothered to jot down a guesstimate. If you need to extract a foreboding headline from the claims release, that’ll work. 1.899 million counts as a new “since-2021” high.

As the figure reminds you, this series, at least, has evidenced something concerning: Namely “elevated” (and again, you really have to put this in historical context, where that means adding scare quotes to adjectives, otherwise you’re just trafficking in nonsensical fear-mongering) longer-term unemployment. (It’s hard to make out because of the light blue highlight on the darker blue line in the chart, but the latest update, circled in red, is actually higher than the December 14 and November 19 peaks.)

Recall that the share of jobless searching for 15 weeks or more (from the BLS dataset) is the highest ever outside of recessions.

Long story short, some jobless are probably finding it a little more difficult to locate jobs, or at least jobs they want, notwithstanding the JOLTS headline which suggests there’s at least one open position for every “officially” unemployed American. Initial claims, rise though they did over the last two weeks, still indicate a reluctance on the part of employers to lay people off.

I should quickly mention two things. First, the government’s probably going to lay some folks off soon if Elon Musk has anything to say about it (and he does). Second, this week’s initial filers print (covering the period to January 18) did count as a six-week high despite being low in an absolute sense, and it captured NFP survey week for January.