Let’s start with the good news: we’re still below 400k new claims. Now the bad: New claims grew to 397k in this week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. The Bloomberg consensus range was 370k to 400k, so this was right at the high end. Last week’s number was up 3k. From the report:

In the week ending March 5, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 397,000, an increase of 26,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 371,000. The 4-week moving average was 392,250, an increase of 3,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 389,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.0 percent for the week ending Feb. 26, unchanged from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending Feb.26 was 3,771,000, a decrease of 20,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,791,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,833,250, a decrease of 34,750 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,868,000.

The bad news continues with the unadjusted data. Remember that this data corresponds to actual people, but isn’t as useful for identifying trends as the adjusted data:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 406,096 in the week ending March 5, an increase of 52,147 from the previous week. There were 459,523 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.5 percent during the week ending Feb. 26, unchanged from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 4,442,438, an increase of 97,576 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 4.3 percent and the volume was 5,538,966.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending Feb 19 was 8,772,818.

The good / bad lists still have a strong bias toward the good list because they provide the breakdown for last week’s unadjusted data. Next week will reverse this:

The good list (-1000 or more): CA, IL, MO, TX, TN, NY, GA, PA, NC

The bad list (+1000 or more): MA

MA (the worst) was +3,804 vs CA (the best) at -12,730. A few states credited a shorter workweek with decreasing claims, while Massachusetts actually blamed school vacations for increasing new claims. Construction, trade, and service all received a large amount of credit for decreases.

In other news, there’s not a lot of other US employment news this week (Greece is screwed, though). I’ve seen two employment models that indicate a worsening employment picture in the future. These are based on employment cycles in recoveries, though, and are notable for the fact that they ignore a lot of potential employment data sources in their inputs.

This was a bad report. Due to the absolute level remaining below 400k, I’m not going to call it a terrible report. Also, I’m not convinced that some of the claims are carried over from the prior week (making the assessment of that report less good). But increases are unwelcome, and there’s little here to celebrate.