Coincident Indicator
After lamenting the fact that the continuing claims numbers are no longer a very useful statistic, I started looking at other employment statistics. Graphing the year over year change in payrolls shows a pretty strong correlation between upticks in the graph and the end of recessions. Remember that the NBER will declare the end to this recession well after the fact (“oh, the recession? That ended a year ago.”), and this statistic is updated monthly with a one week lag (though this graph updates with a one month lag).
