The weekly report for new unemployment claims was issued this morning. The number today was 401,000 up 6,000 from last week's revised figure of 395,000. The real message of this report is that the economy is continuing to drift. Things are neither getting better nor worse on the employment front. We are still at the 400,000 level which means that there should be no improvement in the unemployment rates.
Of course, tomorrow morning the government will release the unemplyment report for September. It already starts out with a bump in the number of jobs created since the Verizon strikers who returned to work will be counted as new jobs. That means that there will be 45,000 new jobs if everything else stays the same. We already know that the number of workers laid off in large layoffs was up substantially in September. Hopefully, the trend did not continue among small employers and we will see some job creation for the month.
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