Unemployment insurance claims picture

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This graph shows weekly claims and continued claims since 1971.

Note: continued claims peaked at 5.4% of covered employment in 1982 and 7.0% in 1975.
The four-week average of weekly unemployment claims increased this week by 500, and is now 41,500 below the peak of 10 weeks ago. There is a reasonable chance that claims have peaked for this cycle.

However the level of initial claims (over 627 thousand) is still very high, indicating significant weakness in the job market.

My view is the most useful number in the weekly claims report is the number of seasonally adjusted initial claims (with a 4-week moving average because it is so noisy). This has declined from the peak of 10 weeks ago, but is still very high. This suggests that the peak of job losses might be behind us, but also that there are still significant job losses occurring. We will probably see monthly job losses reported by the BLS until the weekly initial claims numbers declines close to 400 thousand.