This week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report brought no surprises. The claim is that this reflects making it past two weeks of administrative delays adding to the numbers. Of course, that means that the period before the bump, when the delays were adding to the backlog, was worse than reported. Smoothing the bump also makes this week look substantially less impressive. New claims came in at 456k while last week’s number was revised down 4k. New claims fell within the Bloomberg consensus range of 440k to 465k. From the report:

In the week ending April 17, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 456,000, a decrease of 24,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 480,000. The 4-week moving average was 460,250, an increase of 2,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 457,500.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.6 percent for the week ending April 10, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week’s revised rate of 3.7 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending April 10 was 4,646,000, a decrease of 40,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 4,686,000. The 4-week moving average was 4,643,750, a decrease of 5,500 from the preceding week’s revised average of 4,649,250.

My usual defense of using the seasonally adjusted numbers for tracking trends rings a little hollow when the reporting agency claims there were large distortions due to administrative delays, but there’s not much of an apparent trend even when smoothing the data. Let’s get creative and call the trend “meandering sideways.” This isn’t as good as “down.” The unadjusted numbers look better.

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 431,740 in the week ending April 17, a decrease of 79,187 from the previous week. There were 596,564 initial claims in the comparable week in 2009.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.8 percent during the week ending April 10, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 4,906,633, a decrease of 75,054 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 4.8 percent and the volume was 6,406,046.

Better, but still not great.

The good / bad lists look terrible (reminder: this data is a week delayed):

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

The bad list (+1000 or more): RI, OH, MO, SC, AZ, AR, AK, NC, WI, TN, KS, TX, IN, FL, CA, NY

NY (the worst) was +23,876 vs KY (the best) at -2,147. Manufacturing, Trade, Service, and Construction were all well represented in the bad list. The weather (flooding in RI) and backlog clearing (CA) were added to the list of excuses.

In other news, the unemployment benefits extension was signed into law last week. This retroactively extends benefits to June 2. COBRA and flood insurance subsidies were extended to May 31. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This report was an improvement over the last two reports, but the improvements were mitigated by the announcement that an administrative backlog has been worked off. We’re still above the 400k new claims associated with sustainable jobs growth.