November 21, 2009. That’s the date we first visited this level of new unemployment claims. In other words, labor market stability hasn’t improved in more than 8 months (graph here). In today’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report, new claims rose to 479k (November 21 was 477k). This is the worst number in three months. Last week’s number was revised up 3k. This was outside the Bloomberg consensus range of 444k to 465k. From the report:

In the week ending July 31, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 479,000, an increase of 19,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 460,000. The 4-week moving average was 458,500, an increase of 5,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 453,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.6 percent for the week ending July 24, unchanged from the prior week’s unrevised rate of 3.6 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending July 24 was 4,537,000, a decrease of 34,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 4,571,000. The 4-week moving average was 4,575,500, an increase of 25,750 from the preceding week’s revised average of 4,549,750.

While the seasonally adjusted data is useful for identifying the trend, and the trend has done nothing but disappoint, the unadjusted data is useful for identifying the actual number of people turning to unemployment insurance. That data looks a little better:

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 399,570 in the week ending July 31, a decrease of 14,247 from the previous week. There were 466,695 initial claims in the comparable week in 2009.

The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.5 percent during the week ending July 24, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week. The advance unadjusted number for persons claiming UI benefits in state programs totaled 4,418,756, a decrease of 152,113 from the preceding week. A year earlier, the rate was 4.5 percent and the volume was 6,019,822.

This week’s unadjusted move was in the right direction, even if it wasn’t as impressive as last week’s move. Last week gave us an 18% swing to the good direction, and I indicated we’d get better-looking good/bad lists. The good/bad lists give us a better breakdown by state and industry of where the labor market is firming/softening, with an additional week delay. The lists do not disappoint:

The good list (-1000 or more): CA, NY, NC, MI, GA, SC, PA, IL, AL, NJ, TN, TX, WI, FL, MO, OR, VA, IN, KY

The bad list (+1000 or more): None

CA topped the good list with -19,107. Nearly every industry showed up in the comments, but construction and manufacturing take the crown.

In other news, there’s very little other news. There’s another Tier V Bill being introduced in the Senate, but until there’s an indication of broader support, there’s little reason to expect it to pass. Some states are still issuing retroactive benefit checks, but that was “news” last week.

This report certainly disappointed. At least the unadjusted data moved in the right direction, even if the data is normally better this time of year. As a reminder, tomorrow’s jobs report will trump today’s report. This report only tells us about layoffs, not how many new jobs are created to offset those layoffs. But history suggests we need to move convincingly below 400k new claims on an adjusted basis to have sustainable jobs growth (growth and stability tend to go together). Worse, Bernanke says we need 100k new jobs a month just to maintain the unemployment rate, and that assumes normal demographics and a steady labor force participation rate. If many boomers delay retirement, then Bernanke is an optimist. Of course the participation rate could continue to drop, and the unemployment rate will show “improvement”—if more people are out of work but the unemployment rate drops because too many people have given up hope for finding work, is that really improvement? We need to see this new claims number drop.