There was less of a move in new claims than last week. We’re still below 500k. That’s the good news from this week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. Initial claims increased to 480,000. Last week’s number was revised down 1,000. This was above the (rather tight) Bloomberg consensus range of 460k to 470k. From the report:

In the week ending Dec. 12, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 480,000, an increase of 7,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 473,000. The 4-week moving average was 467,500, a decrease of 5,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 472,750.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.9 percent for the week ending Dec. 5, unchanged from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 3.9 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending Dec. 5 was 5,186,000, an increase of 5,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 5,181,000. The 4-week moving average was 5,318,250, a decrease of 106,750 from the preceding week’s revised average of 5,425,000.

There’s not a lot of good news to be gleaned from these numbers. The seasonally adjusted numbers are the number to use for trend tracking, and the downtrend has taken a breather. On the plus side, the unadjusted numbers, those that correspond to actual people, were down for the week:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 555,344 in the week ending Dec. 12, a decrease of 107,393 from the previous week. There were 629,867 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.9 percent during the week ending Dec. 5, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,176,122, a decrease of 222,989 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 3.3 percent and the volume was 4,378,273.

If you take the decrease in the unadjusted numbers as good news, you must also temper that news with the fact that actual initial claims are above 500k. Swinging back to positive, we’re still showing improvement over last year.

The good / bad lists look terrible in this report. I mentioned that this would be the case last week. This isn’t some impressive display of foresight on my part. These lists lag by an extra week, so we saw the aggregate numbers last week.

The good list (-1000 or more): KS, KY

The bad list (+1000 or more): UT, MA, MS, CO, WV, OH, AZ, NV, WI, CT, NJ, MN, MO, OR, MD, WA, AL, VA, MI, SC, TN, FL, IL, TX, NY, PA, NC, GA, CA

CA (the worst) was +28,358 vs KS (the best) at -3,803. Remember that California’s last showing was actually greater in magnitude on the good list, so this isn’t quite as horrible as it looks. Also, this represented the week after Thanksgiving, so having an extra day for layoffs matters. Aside from those two observations, blame must be assigned to the construction, service, manufacturing, trade, automobiles, textile, warehousing, finance, insurance, transportation, rubber/plastics, and agriculture industries, in approximately that order. The broad representation of industries and the length of the bad list should be taken as negative signs. I know that there’s very few good times to get canned, but between the two major holidays has to rank up on the list of many bad times to get canned.

There was a lot of headline space dedicated to the unemployment benefits extension fix this last week. Unfortunately, it seems to be part of a bill that includes a jobs package and an increase to the national debt ceiling. I say “unfortunate,” because both of these other two parts of the bill are going to generate heated debate in Congress. Heated debates take time, and the broken version that currently exists doesn’t have a lot of time left. Fortunately, there is a constraint on the national debt ceiling as well. We’re going to be hitting that soon, and the only two options are to raise the debt ceiling and to monetize some existing debt. The other logical option, emergency spending cuts, is logistically (and politically) constrained. If I were to make predictions, then, I would say that the bill will pass in time for the unemployed (and the Treasury). This is a change from my outlook last week.

Bottom line: this wasn’t a good report, but there’s still reason for some optimism this week. The broken unemployment benefits extension will likely be fixed before the end of the year.