If the plunge in initial US jobless claims witnessed in and around Thanksgiving was a fluke, so too was the subsequent week’s snapback surge.

Wednesday’s initial filers update, released a day early to account for the Christmas holiday, showed a second straight outsized decline in the week ended December 20.

At 214,000, headline claims are the lowest in nearly a year excluding the above-mentioned late-November plunge.

As the figure shows, the two-week decline erased half of the steep post-Thanksgiving increase.

I’ve mentioned this before, but here it is again: Jobless claims post-pandemic feels like a “dead” dataset. This series hasn’t held a meaningful spike in years. We’ve had plenty of “jump scares” — in horror movie parlance — but no sustained upturn of the sort you typically see in the lead-up to recessions.

Continuing claims, which’ve consistently loitered near the highest levels since late 2021, were 1.923 million in the week to December 13. That was ahead of estimates, but merely puts the series back to pre-Thanksgiving levels.

Consensus for the initial claims print was 224,000. The four-week average slipped to 216,750, the second-lowest since January.

As BMO’s Vail Hartman wrote, “All in all, while the number of initial filers has been subject to seasonal volatility of late, the four-week average is historically-suppressed, pointing to ongoing stability in the employment landscape despite recent signs of fragility.”