New unemployment claims nudged up this week. The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report put the number at 427k. Last week came in at 422k before its upward revision of +4k, so this wasn’t quite as flat as it first appears. The Bloomberg consensus range was predicting a slight drop to between 415k to 420k, so this a bit of a disappointment. From the report:

In the week ending June 4, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 427,000, an increase of 1,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 426,000. The 4-week moving average was 424,000, a decrease of 2,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 426,750.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.9 percent for the week ending May 28, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending May 28 was 3,676,000, a decrease of 71,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,747,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,719,250, a decrease of 29,000 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,748,250.

If there’s any good news this week, it comes from the unadjusted numbers. Since this corresponds to actual people instead of trend data, it’s nice to know that almost 17k fewer people filed for new unemployment claims:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 364,507 in the week ending June 4, a decrease of 16,990 from the previous week. There were 398,864 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.7 percent during the week ending May 28, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,407,607, a decrease of 102,900 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 3.3 percent and the volume was 4,202,202.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending May 21 was 7,601,344, a decrease of 89,233 from the previous week.

I found no related news worth mentioning on the unemployment front. Corn futures hit an all time high today. With high oil prices persisting (even if we get the expected seasonal drop in gas prices, it will still be at the level considered a drag on the economy), there’s going to be further pressure on margins due to high input costs for the economy. We’ll see what pricing power the grocers and retailers have, but any CPI creep is going to hit pretty hard. The wholesale inventory and sales data was a bit of a disappointment today. That will get worse if input costs continue to stay high. I’d expect this to have negative consequences on employment in the near future.

Interesting fact for the monthly employment report, though: there’s a huge negative seasonal factor that could dwarf this non-seasonal bit. The multiplicative aspect of seasonal adjustments acts as a bit of a shock absorber on bad news. Each non-seasonal job loss becomes a fractional job-loss in the adjusted number (to adjust for the seasonal teacher layoffs, the total employment number is multiplied by a number greater than 1 before monthly comparisons are made). Similarly, good news is tempered in the counter-adjustment months. I wonder if the timing will help make bad news more palatable.

This was a bad report. Again, any number over 400k is a bad report. Increases in new claims are a bad thing. Together, they’re bad. In an environment of rising costs, they’re bad. All those bads sum up to bad. At least the unadjusted number looked good.