I’m always cautious about declaring a turning point for US jobless claims.

Each and every time macro doomsayers think they see a recession harbinger in the claims series, it turns out to be a false alarm, and while there’s good reason to suspect the US labor market’s finally run out of luck, I’m not brave enough to make any predictions. I’ll let someone else be wrong.

All of that said, I’d be remiss not to quickly mention Thursday’s claims update, which found the initial filers series printing near 250,000 for a second straight week.

248,000 on the headline was ahead of the 242,000 consensus and unchanged from the prior week (which was revised up from 247,000).

These are the highest readings since the hurricane-related spike in early October, and they’ve now succeeded in pushing the four-week average above 240,000 for the first time since August.

With claims, there’s always a caveat. Or two. Or three. Which is to say there’s always an excuse. I don’t know what this week’s excuse is, and I don’t care. You’d have to ask someone who gets paid eight times a nurse’s salary to be perpetually wrong about macro aggregates, which is to say you’d have to ask a Wall Street economist.

Continuing claims in the week to May 31 (remember: ongoing claims are reported on a two-week lag) rose to 1.956 million, well ahead of consensus and yet another new “since November 2021” high.