The U.S. Department of Labor released the Weekly Claims data for Unemployment Insurance yesterday. Initial claims were at 509,000 for the week ending November 29th. This is down from the previous week's number of 530,000. The four week average of initial claims, which is not as volatile, was at 524,500. This is the highest initial claims has been since 1982 surpassing the recessions of 1991 and 2001.
Continued claims for unemployment insurance increased to 4,087,000 for the week ending November 22nd up from the previous week's number of 3,998,000. The four week average for continued claims was also up to 4,001,750 from 3,938,000. This is the highest it has been since January 1983.
Initial claims is faster to move up and signals increases in the unemployment rate. Continued claims take longer to go down than the initial claims once the unemployment rate is elevated. The Unemployment rate doesn't drop until continued claims start to come down.
Unemployment is on the rise. According to "The Employment Situation" for November 2008 released today by the U.S. Department of Labor, the unemployment rate was at 6.7% in November compared to 6.5% in October. Since 1948, the unemployment rate has never risen by more than .5% in a 12 month span without entering into a recession. The unemployment rate is now up 2.0% in the last twelve months and is up 2.3% from its recent low of 4.4%.
Nonfarm payrolls decreased by 533,000 in November, 320,000 in October, and by 403,000 in September. This was the most amount of jobs lost in one month since 1974. Last month they revised downward the amount of jobs lost in the previous two months by 179,000. This month, they made a downward revision of 199,000. If you add the payrolls lost in November to the revisions for October and September, jobs were worse off by 732,000 more than was previously reported. This is a significant amount of jobs lost. The average recession since World War II has had a loss of 1,917,000 jobs on average. The biggest loss came in 1982 with 2,838,000 jobs lost. Nonfarm payrolls have declined for 11 straight months with a net loss of 1,911,000. This recession looks like it will develop into the biggest recession in terms of jobs lost since the Great Depression.
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