Who Are They Kidding?

 I saw the headline about this morning's weekly report of new unemployment claims.  It read "Weekly Jobless Claims Tick Higher" on the list of articles at Yahoo Finance.  Sure enough, that is what TheStreet.com says in the article linked to the headline above.

But here's the reality.  New unemployment claims last week were 884,000. The previous week they were 884,000.  That's right, The claim number was identical to the one the prior week.  Despite the headline and the text of the article, claims stayed exactly the same.  And that means that for the first time since the pandemic began, weekly unemployment claims were under a million for two weeks in a row now.

The sad thing is that the article itself eventually got to the point of stating the actual numbers if you read to the 14th paragraph.  Most of the article, though, was devoted to explaining why these numbers under a million were really not important and didn't indicate any improvement in the labor market.

This is just another example of Fake News. It's important to remember that since the pandemic started to affect unemployment claims six months ago, there have been 60.1 new claims filed.  that's an average of 2.3 million claims each week.  Obviously, this week's figure which is about one-third the average is really good.

Okay, actually, it's not helpful to compare the average number of claims during the pandemic to last week's numbers.  Sure, it's lower now.  Sure, it's at the lowest since this mess began.  I just made that "analysis" to show how easy it is to push a "political position" rather than economic analysis.