Not telling. The most specific thing I’ve said about my current research is that it is not related to anything I post nor to any job I’ve had in the last five years. I almost violated this rule of silence when I submitted a paper with a reference to a Nobel Prize winning economist, simply because I had never cited a Nobel Prize winner before. Rest assured, my dissertation is boring, academic, and in no way related to the real world.

This week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report could have been much worse. Some analysts were expecting an increase in new claims up to 500k, terrible news this late in a “recovery.” Fortunately, new claims fell to 457k. Unfortunately, last week’s number was revised up by 4k. Discounting the revision, this is extremely slow progress. The new claims number fell near the low end of the Bloomberg consensus range of 455k to 500k. From the report:

In the week ending July 24, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 457,000, a decrease of 11,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 468,000. The 4-week moving average was 452,500, a decrease of 4,500 from the previous week’s revised average of 457,000.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.6 percent for the week ending July 17, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 3.5 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending July 17 was 4,565,000, an increase of 81,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 4,484,000. The 4-week moving average was 4,548,250, a decrease of 18,000 from the preceding week’s revised average of 4,566,250.

If there’s some genuinely good news in this report, it can be found by looking at the unadjusted data. The unadjusted data isn’t useful for tracking trends, but let’s face it: the trend is sideways and has been for more than six months. The unadjusted data is useful for measuring the actual impact on state programs. An 18% swing to the good side may be seasonal, but it’s also 91 thousand actual people not left scratching their heads at the labor market.

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 411,107 in the week ending July 24, a decrease of 91,366 from the previous week. There were 511,628 initial claims in the comparable week in 2009.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.6 percent during the week ending July 17, unchanged from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 4,564,922, a decrease of 12,920 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 4.6 percent and the volume was 6,104,047.

This week’s good / bad lists look worse than I anticipated. This assessment stems from the fact that I live in California. New York has as much reason to smile as I have to frown. Next week will have a 91,366 bias toward the good list:

The good list (-1000 or more): NY, IN, MI, PA, FL, NJ, KY, KS, OH, WI

The bad list (+1000 or more): AL, GA, TN, IL, NC, SC, CA

CA (the worst) was +19,809 vs NY (the best) at -19,552. The sectors responsible were pretty well balanced between the good and bad lists.

In other news, the checks are in the mail. The recent unemployment benefits extension was signed into law and playing retroactive catch-up. Unfortunately, the long awaited “next shoe” appears genuinely ready to drop. According to a recent report, crunches in state and local budgets will cause another 500,000 government jobs to get the axe. California is already back in a declared “State of Emergency” and may start issuing IOUs instead of paychecks as early as August (next week?!). Labor law lawyers should probably move to California. There’s bound to be work there. Too bad neither side has money to pay you. IOU?

There were fears that this report was going to be absolutely terrible. Instead, it was merely mediocre. State budgets will prove to be an ongoing problem. With the exception of California’s IOUs, most state woes will hit like a never-ending Washington drizzle, not a Florida hurricane.

Frozen Thin Mints and dissertation writing go together like tumblr and procrastinating on said dissertation writing.

This is depressing. Turns out the brightest part of the HAMP report, the low re-default rate, was subject to a miscalculation.

“In an effort to review and better explain the methodology, we learned from our program administrator, Fannie Mae, that not all cancelled [sic] loans were included in the underlying information provided to Treasury,” Paustenbach continued. “The error caused inconsistent reporting of permanent modifications during the snapshots reported. These omissions have impacted our previous analysis… with respect to the performance of HAMP permanent modifications.”

A Treasury official added that the agency had approved a methodology that included cancelled [sic] modifications, but Fannie Mae’s coding error led to those mods not being included in their calculation of re-default rates. The official added that Treasury will release the revised data when it’s confident in its accuracy.

…

Meanwhile, last month analysts at Fitch Ratings projected that as many as 75 percent of HAMP modifications will ultimately result in re-default — despite the lower monthly payments. In their note last week, the Barclays analysts said they’re sticking to their original re-default projection of about 60 percent.

(via CalculatedRisk)