Initial claims remain stubbornly high but did fall under the 2 million mark for the first time in 11 weeks.
Continuing claims took a turn for the worse and rose to 21.487 million.
Initial Claims
Eleven-Week Total
The eleven-week running total of initial claims is 42.647 million.
However, some of those workers have been called back as states have opened. Also some people submitted claims and were not really eligible.
Continuing claims, at 21.487 million, paint a better picture at this point as to what is happening.
BLS Reference Week
The reference week for the BLS Household Survey unemployment report is the week that contains the 12th of the month. It is that week’s survey that determines the unemployment rate.
For the May Jobs Report coming out Friday, June 5, the reference week was May 10 through May 16.
Thus today’s numbers will not impact the May jobs report out tomorrow.
Bogus Number
As noted on May 9, there was a 6.4 Million Discrepancy Between Employment and Unemployment.
The BLS is very aware they published a bogus unemployment number for April and issued this notice.
If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to “other reasons” (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical April) had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been almost 5 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally adjusted basis). However, according to usual practice, the data from the household survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are taken to reclassify survey responses.
Data Integrity
To maintain “data integrity” the BLS reported a number known to be bogus.
There is still more to this BLS fiddling saga.
Click on the preceding link for details about Seasonal Adjustments and an unusual statement regarding their Birth-Death model adjustments.
Tomorrow’s Reported Number
The BLS will report the May unemployment rate tomorrow.
Judging from continued claims, the unemployment rate would be 14.7% as I calculated a week ago.
That is not my prediction, it is just a “what if the unemployment rate matches the claims” statement.
The consensus estimate tomorrow is for an unemployment rate of 19.8%.
If the number is that high, the BLS will have done a far better job eliciting responses than it did last month.
My unemployment rate guess: 18.5%. We find out tomorrow.
Mish
Initial and continuing claims are going to remain somewhat elevated because larger companies have announced they will be downsizing over the next 2-5 months.
1942:
“Hey, did you hear they’re rounding up American citizens of Japanese descent and marching them to concentration camps?”
“Aw, c’mon, you’re full of it. They’re not marching them. They’re putting them in trucks.”
That’s how literally fucking stupid this tear gas “debate” is. If tactics and semantics are what bother you, your swastika armband is on too tight.
CO: “The market will crater this summer…”
Jerome Powell: “Hold my apple-tini.”
Dow 20 million coming. Ok stonks dropped today, but long term wise we are looking at adding a couple of zeroes to the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq.
At least the BLS is transparent that their number is bogus. How could you get a good number in this environment?
Less activity on this thread since the Trumpers cannot argue with facts like unemployment filings 🙂
You mean the facts like the police officers were not wearing gas masks when they were claimed to have been tear gassing people?
Learn what the definition of tear gas is. I will keep posting this every time you bring it up.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and some of his supporters are claiming authorities did not use tear gas against people in a crackdown outside the White House this week. There’s evidence they did.
Law enforcement officials shy away from describing crowd-dispersing chemical tools as tear gas; it evokes police gassing citizens or the horrors of war. But giving those tools a more antiseptic name does not change the reality on the ground.
Federal institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense have listed tear gas as the common term for riot-control agents. Whether the common or formal term is used, the effects on people are the same.
“They didn’t use tear gas,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox News Radio. The U.S. Park Police denied using tear gas, yet acknowledged deploying a pepper compound, which the CDC and other scientific organizations list as one form of tear gas.
Authorities, who came from more than a half-dozen agencies besides the Park Police, set loose several wafting compounds, causing people to cough and gag as they scattered, their eyes red and streaming in some cases. They displayed the results of exposure to tear gas — tears, for example.
“Tear gas is anything that makes you cry,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, speaking of chemicals used in crowd dispersal. “Pepper spray is a tear gas. But there are all kinds of other ones, too.”
Compounds that are listed as riot-control agents make people temporarily unable to function by irritating their eyes, mouth, throat, lungs and skin, the CDC says. They are “sometimes referred to as ‘tear gas,’” says a CDC fact sheet.
The Handbook of Toxicology of Chemical Warfare Agents also uses tear gas as an informal umbrella term for riot-control agents and cites pepper spray as one kind. In the unrest near the White House, officers shot plastic balls with pepper powder from what looked like souped-up paintball guns, and dispersed other compounds in a stinging fog.
The book also says riot-control agents are “popularly referred to as ‘tear gas’ or ‘pepper spray.’” It says they may be combined with an explosive substance in grenades, released in a smoke of particles from handheld devices or sprayed in a solution.
Full Coverage: AP Fact Check
The disabling effects of tear gas are designed to be short-lived, but the CDC says prolonged exposure “may lead to long-term effects such as eye problems including scarring, glaucoma, and cataracts, and may possibly cause breathing problems such as asthma.”
An Army research institute paper in 2009 cites riot-control agents and tear gas interchangeably. It says tear gas is something of a misnomer, because the agents tend not to be gaseous and modern compounds can affect a wider variety of organs as well as the eyes, lungs and digestive tract that are historically the targets of tear gas.
Dr. Sven-Eric Jordt researches tear gas agents and chemical exposure injuries in his lab at the Duke University School of Medicine’s Integrated Toxicology and Environmental Health Program.
He said newer compounds, which may have been used in the “pepper ball” projectiles deployed at the protest, might or might not fit a traditional definition of tear gas but are as potent and come with scant research on their safety. Any difference is semantic, he said.
“There’s been very little research on tear gas being done in the United States,” he said, and “no research backing up the use levels that are deployed now.”
Jordt said the two main categories of crowd-clearing irritants — known as CS and OC — both activate the pain-sensing nervous system sharply, which in turn can make the body more susceptible to a virus. “I’m just very concerned this might increase the likelihood of infection” in the coronavirus pandemic, he said, or trigger more extreme reactions in people who have the virus but are not showing symptoms.
“To use these highly irritating agents on protesters is not a good idea,” he said. “It’s really shocking that it is used to that extent.”
Add PUA and you get 31 mln. Pua is for self-employed…
If we can get the 30 year mortgage rate to 2%, that would go a long way in helping out.
People need a job to get a loan, at least for now. Maybe we’ll see loans that just start out in forbearance….
You could lower mortgage rates to 0% and it wouldn’t matter much. Unemployed people have stopped making mortgage payments to pay for bare necessities.
Thanks, so savers get no returns for their efforts?
Exactly. We need to put a stop to this “saving” thing.
Looks like many millions of people also haven’t received a single unemployment check yet. The market will crater this summer because earnings season is coming and companies will be forced to restate their projections for Q3 and Q4. Also unemployment isn’t going to spike until September when furlough’ed employees (who are still getting paid) are going to finally be laid off. This is for companies that took PPP money.
The initial 8 weeks is nearly over, and my PPP money is nearly gone. I will be laying people off in about 2 weeks. Why do you think you won’t see an effect until September?
Some industries got bailouts that pay employees until September. Airlines were one of them. So was Boeing . Delta just announced cancellation of routes to 11 cities. But those pilots will be paid through September 1st.
“After turning lower last week, continued unemployment claims took a turn for the worse again this week.”
…
but but but … that sorta puts a dent in the bulltards V nirvana …
Congress just passed a patch to PPP … stretching the 8 weeks into 24 and lowering % toward payroll to 60%.
IF claims continue to be stubbornly high going forward ??
The market is priced for a V but we will get a checkmark recovery similar to the one from the great recession that takes half a decade. The Fed will end up holding the assets they are holding and buying more. The average unemployed worker would be better off taking their money and investing when the market bottoms. The Fed has created an alternate reality between the stock market and main street again. They did this with loose credit and low rates in the 2000s. IMO, we are going to see a repeat of the 2000s this decade except worse. The Fed will be forced to write off bad debts off its own books and support the dollar as China and others walk away over the decade. At this point, we basically live in a MMT economy managed by the Fed and Treasury. We will never get back to a world where the Fed has clean books or the Treasury doesn’t have to create more money to keep the government and economy going.