It’s Thursday, and time for the Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report. It didn’t make headlines this week, which is too bad. The news is pretty good. The seasonally adjusted initial claims decreased:

In the week ending March 14, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 646,000, a decrease of 12,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 658,000. The 4-week moving average was 654,750, an increase of 3,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 651,000.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.1 percent for the week ending March 7, an increase of 0.2 percentage point from the prior week’s revised rate of 3.9 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending March 7 was 5,473,000, an increase of 185,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 5,288,000. The 4-week moving average was 5,251,250, an increase of 118,750 from the preceding week’s revised average of 5,132,500.

Initial claims are down, but the insured unemployment rate was up. So on an adjusted basis, fewer people are losing their jobs, but fewer still have jobs in the first place. As usual, if you are tracking employment trends, the seasonally adjusted number is probably the way to do it. However, if you are concerned about other people or your own job, you might want to look at the unadjusted numbers. This week the unadjusted numbers are good:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 594,121 in the week ending March 14, a decrease of 58,515 from the previous week. There were 335,917 initial claims in the comparable week in 2008.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 4.7 percent during the week ending March 7, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 6,332,272, a decrease of 29,082 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 2.5 percent and the volume was 3,297,238.

That’s positive. Every little bit helps.

Let’s look at the good/bad lists:

The good list (-1000 or more): NY, CT, TN, CA, OR, RI, OH

The bad list (+1000 or more): LA, MN, NJ, NC, MI, FL, TX, PA, IN

IN (the worst) was +5,603 vs. NY (the best) at -11,218.

New York was the worst last week, so things appear to be rather volatile.