Jobless Claims: Ludicrous Mode

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, weekly jobless claims continue to amaze us. In this week’s report, first-time claims came in at 210K, which was 15K below the consensus estimate of 225K. The last time a weekly print came in that low was in 1969! It has now been seven straight weeks that jobless claims have come in below 250K and 156 straight weeks that they have been below 300K. Barring a 90K increase in the next few weeks, the current streak of sub-300K readings will go down as the longest ever.

With another extraordinarily low reading this week, the four-week moving average dropped by nearly 5K down to 220.5K. That’s also the lowest level for this indicator since 1969!

On a non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) basis, jobless claims dropped down to 195.9K. For the current week of the year, that was the lowest weekly reading since at least 1967. More recently, since 2000 this week’s print was more than 132K below average.