The Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report started us off with some less-bad news today: new unemployment claims dropped. After a +3k revision to last week’s number, new claims registered a drop of 16k, to 414k. This was safely inside the Bloomberg consensus range of 408k to 425k. From the report:

In the week ending June 11, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 414,000, a decrease of 16,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 430,000. The 4-week moving average was 424,750, unchanged from the previous week’s revised average of 424,750.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.9 percent for the week ending June 4, unchanged from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 2.9 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending June 4 was 3,675,000, a decrease of 21,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,696,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,709,000, a decrease of 15,250 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,724,250.

It’s nice to see the continuing claims number drop too, though I always wonder about the reason for that number coming down. Did benefits expire? Did they get jobs? Did they give up?

If you count actual people instead of looking at trend data, the comparisons to last week don’t look as good. The unadjusted new claims number moved in the wrong direction:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 394,910 in the week ending June 11, an increase of 28,094 from the previous week. There were 448,305 initial claims in the comparable week in 2010.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.8 percent during the week ending June 4, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 3,465,277, an increase of 38,932 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 3.4 percent and the volume was 4,319,021.

The total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending May 28 was 7,401,228, a decrease of 209,116 from the previous week.

In other news, there’s very little interesting employment news this week. California received another federal cash infusion for unemployment benefits. $800 million is a significant chunk of change, even for a large state like CA.

Another week, another bad new claims report. Any number above 400k new claims is a bad report, but it’s still nice to see a smaller number than last week.