This week’s unemployment statistics are moving in the wrong direction, but with a possible silver lining. The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report has been released. Initial claims rose to 482,000. Last week’s number was revised up 2,000. This was above the Bloomberg consensus range of 435k to 450k. From the report:

In the week ending Jan. 16, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 482,000, an increase of 36,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 446,000. The 4-week moving average was 448,250, an increase of 7,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 441,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.5 percent for the week ending Jan. 9, unchanged from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 3.5 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending Jan. 9 was 4,599,000, a decrease of 18,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 4,617,000. The 4-week moving average was 4,750,500, a decrease of 109,750 from the preceding week’s revised average of 4,860,250.

New claims are up and only about 1 in 3 unemployed people are able to collect unemployment benefits (worse if you use broader unemployment measures). Where was that silver lining? Bloomberg (sorry, no useful link) reported that the increase may be due to bottlenecks in processing, not new layoffs. If this is true, we should be setting up for about three weeks of declining initial claims. Unfortunately, it also means that the employment situation after Christmas was weaker than the seasonal adjustment process anticipated. Speaking of seasonal adjustments, the post-Christmas bump appears to have passed. There are significant improvements to the unadjusted numbers:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 650,728 in the week ending Jan. 16, a decrease of 154,194 from the previous week. There were 763,987 initial claims in the comparable week in 2009.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.4 percent during the week ending Jan. 9, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,716,608, a decrease of 299,837 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 4.2 percent and the volume was 5,651,117.

The new claims numbers still show year-over-year improvement. The employment environment is more stable than last year. That appears to be as close to good news as we will get for a while. Because of changes to the monthly report, I have doubts that we will see a positive jobs number in the near future. The December report was the best chance we had.

The good / bad lists look particularly terrible. These are from the peak week:

The good list (-1000 or more): OR, IA, KY, MI, MA

The bad list (+1000 or more): ND, OK, UT, HI, MT, OH, WV, IN, LA, NV, AK, NJ, CO, MD, AZ, AL, CT, MO, KS, NY, TN, IL, VA, SC, NC, GA, PA, FL, TX, CA

CA (the worst) was +16,160 vs OR (the best) at -5,784. Construction, manufacturing, trade, and service were all well represented on the bad list. My (Captain Obvious) prediction from last week came to pass. California’s employment environment simply couldn’t support it staying in the good list the week of peak layoffs. Next week’s lists will show significant improvement. Then we can start to hope that the volatility drops a little.

The unknown impact of the census hiring is still the big news for the short term. There’s a possibility that state budgets will ruin the party, so use headlines on that topic as a bit of a canary in the jobs coal mine. The long term outlook is still hostage to the lack of an engine for jobs growth. The dismal state of small business hiring needs to reverse for the long term outlook to change.