Is it even worth documenting US jobless claims anymore?

I honestly don’t know, because as noted here last week (and on countless occasions previous), this series feels “dead” in the sense that it hasn’t told us anything useful in years.

To briefly recapitulate, claims plunged to a multi-year low late last month in and around Thanksgiving only to surge a week later. Then, over the ensuing two weeks, they retraced sharply to the second-lowest in nearly a year.

On Wednesday, the Department of Labor said initial filers fell again to just 199,000 in the week to December 27, which is to say Christmas week.

As the figure shows, that nearly matched the Thanksgiving low. The four-week average moved up as the late-November low print rolled out of the lookback.

Obviously, the figures are distorted by the holiday, but note that consensus was 218,000. So, this was another meaningful undershoot, distortions or not.

Continuing claims for the prior week were just 1.866 million, the second-lowest since April. Consensus for that readout was 1.90 million.

Suffice to say this is one place you’re not seeing evidence of labor market deterioration. Or maybe this is just the “low-firing” side of the “low-hiring, low-firing” zeitgeist.