US jobless claims. Occasionally, they spike. When they do, everybody “flips out, man.” (Shades of Jim Breuer from Half Baked.)

Then — where “then” typically means the very next week — claims recede. And everybody pretends they didn’t make a big deal of the fleeting uptick.

That all-too-familiar song and dance played out this month, when the initial filers series jumped to a four-year high only to give back the entirety of the increase, and then some, seven days later.

On Thursday, claims fell even further. At just 218,000, the headline initial filers series now sits near its lowest levels of 2025.

As the figure shows, the two-week decline — 46,000 — is the most pronounced for any two-week stretch since September of 2021.

If you recall, the early-September spike was attributable in no small part to an anomalous surge in Texas claims which almost doubled. Most of that spike’s gone now too.

The four-week average for the overall, national initial filers series is 237,500 after the most recent weekly decline. Continuing claims for the week to September 13 were 1.926 million, the Labor Department said Thursday, a touch below estimates and a 16-week low.

Suffice to say the claims series don’t exactly suggest businesses are laying people off in droves. If anything, these figures argue the opposite, even as other data sets (e.g., Challenger job cuts) suggest layoff announcements are running at a pace not typically witnessed outside recessions.

If you put any stock in economists’ projections, it’s worth noting that Thursday’s headline claims print undershot almost all professional forecasts.