US Debt Maturity Profile, AKA When do we have to pay for all of this?

I was reminded by someone that I was late in producing this chart. In a couple weeks we will have July’s data.

As has been the case for some time, our roll risk is increasing. Note that we’ve managed to shift quite a bit of new debt to longer durations. This has also been the case for some time.

Our average interest rate shows improvement both month-over-month and year-over-year. Let’s see how July and August stack up. Remember, we’ve been holding debt off the market. We’ve not been contributing to certain things that we’ve promised to catch up on when the debt ceiling gets raised. At that point, we will probably start issuing a bit more debt. Some of this was actually eaten up by higher than expected revenues last month, but there’s still some overhang.

As of this chart, the bull market in treasuries has not completed.

(June treasury data here)

Very, very helpful.

A little discouraging information from the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report: new claims increased to 418k (last week’s number was revised up 3k). This was toward the middle of the Bloomberg consensus range of 385k to 430k. It’s still rather unfortunate that we can’t seem to bust through that 400k barrier again. The report makes note of the special circumstance that 1,750 come from Minnesota’s government shutdown. From the report:

In the week ending July 16, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 418,000, an increase of 10,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 408,000. The 4-week moving average was 421,250, a decrease of 2,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 424,000.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.9 percent for the week ending July 9, a 0.1 percentage point decrease from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending July 9 was 3,698,000, a decrease of 50,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,748,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,720,500, a decrease of 4,000 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,724,500.

While the trend data moved in the wrong direction, the data corresponding to actual people moved in the right direction:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 464,865 in the week ending July 16, a decrease of 9,022 from the previous week. There were 502,065 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.0 percent during the week ending July 9, a 0.2 percentage point increase from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,761,025, an increase of 226,332 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 3.6 percent and the volume was 4,562,782.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending July 2 was 7,325,198, a decrease of 159,696 from the previous week.

In other news, this is the first time since the statistic has been tracked that those unemployed for 99 weeks or longer has been over 2 million. That’s a depressing thought for you.

This was a bad report (as are all reports above 400k), but the moving average is still falling from the nasty spike in June. It’s still plausible that better news is in front of us. Unfortunately, a gradual decrease followed by sharp spike as been a common pattern over the last couple years, and there are certainly risks in front of us that could take us that way as well.

Close. Very close. This week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report is about as close to the threshold as we can get. New unemployment claims came in at 405k. That’s a drop of 22k from last week’s revised number. Last week’s number was revised up 9k, but remember that there were several estimates that guaranteed a bit of uncertainty in the data. The Bloomberg consensus headline number was 405k (on a rather narrow range of 395k to 415k), so this definitely hit expectations. From the report:

In the week ending July 9, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 405,000, a decrease of 22,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 427,000. The 4-week moving average was 423,250, a decrease of 3,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 427,000.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.0 percent for the week ending July 2, unchanged from the prior week’s revised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending July 2 was 3,727,000, an increase of 15,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,712,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,719,250, a increase of 6,250 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,713,000.

There are still about 11,500 claims coming from the Minnesota government shutdown in this report, so the labor market at large is actually a bit better than even the headline number might indicate. And lest we forget the unadjusted numbers that correspond to actual human beings, things aren’t really that great. There’s a seasonal retooling in autos and general manufacturing that makes much better headline/trend numbers than humans-getting-the-axe numbers:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 470,671 in the week ending July 9, an increase of 45,031 from the previous week. There were 515,991 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.8 percent during the week ending July 2, unchanged from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,514,148, a decrease of 41,683 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 3.5 percent and the volume was 4,384,591.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending June 25 was 7,484,894, an increase of 25,333 from the previous week.

In other news, I was quite busy this week, and didn’t find anything worth linking to in my hasty Google search. No other employment news.

This was a bad report, but as good as a bad report gets. However, there are a few large factors that seem to be subsiding / past that contributed to the recent high levels. We may be getting good news in the near future.