Predictions:
- Bloomberg — 340,000 seasonally adjusted claims.
- Reuters —
- Business Insider — 337,000
Seasonal adjustment factors:
- Week ended July 6, 2013 — 107.0
- Week ended July 7, 2012 — 121.8
Raw claims:
- Week ended June 29, 2013 (before likely revision this week) — 333,920
- Week ended July 7, 2012 — 442,192
Apparently, layoffs typically increase during the week before July 4. My guess is that this year’s raw number of layoffs was much lower than last year’s comparable week, and that today’s seasonally adjusted number will therefore also be lower. If so, it will be a one-off result from which larger conclusions can’t be drawn. We’ll see.
The report will be here at 8:30.
HERE IT IS (permanent link): So much for that theory –
SEASONALLY ADJUSTED DATA
In the week ending July 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 360,000, an increase of 16,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 344,000. The 4-week moving average was 351,750, an increase of 6,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 345,750.
… UNADJUSTED DATA
The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 384,829 in the week ending July 6, an increase of 49,778 from the previous week. There were 442,192 initial claims in the comparable week in 2012.
To be fair, it looks like Team Obama caught a bad break in the inexplicably lower seasonal adjustment factor this year. If last year’s factor had been used, seasonally adjusted claims would have been 44,000 claims lower (384,829 divided by 121.8 is 316,000, rounded).
Raw claims were down 13%.
Today’s number is artificially high. Next week’s number, given a seasonal adjustment factor of 122.2, should come in artificially low. They’ll probably average out to the numbers in the 340s we’ve seen in recent weeks, and perhaps a bit lower.