Today’s weekly unemployment report was bad for a couple reasons. Bloomberg reports Unemployment Benefit Rolls in U.S. Soar to Record:

Continuing claims for benefits rose to 4.776 million in the week ended Jan. 17, the highest since record-keeping started in 1967, the Labor Department said today in Washington. First-time filings increased 3,000 to 588,000 in the week ended Jan. 24.

These numbers, despite being the worst on record, were within expectations. Of course, that 588,000 is the seasonally adjusted number. As usual, if you are looking for trend data, that’s the number you should look at. If you are concerned about people (or are unemployed yourself), you might want to know the unadjusted number. From the DOL Report:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 617,289 in the week ending Jan. 24, a decrease of 146,776 from the previous week. There were 369,944 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.3 percent during the week ending Jan. 17, an increase of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 5,740,996, an increase of 89,879 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 2.4 percent and the volume was 3,249,574.

617,289 people unemployed in a week. We’re still losing jobs at a pretty good (bad?) clip. Of course, this is down from the 952,151 that followed the post Christmas layoffs.