Last Thursday initial jobless claims dropped to 300K which surprised quite a few traders. This means that employers have slowed down their pace of firing which is a positive sign. On Thursday we will get the next reading on initial jobless claims and economists expect an increase of 15,000. A dip below 300K would be a very big psychological move and could spark US Dollar buying. Personally I think we are a long way from getting figures below 300K on a consistent base.
Hello TheLast Bear,
thank you.
I was looking for an answer to your question, when I chanced upon this article, which you (and others) may
find of interest:
It analyses US labour data from 1948 to the present day, using graphics to show trends and correlation to equities,
among other things…
Cheers.
Thanks for the link.
You are welcome, ‘The Last Bear’.
Looking at this other link Weekly Unemployment Claims ,
you will see how the second chart shows the US weekly unemployment from the 1960s to the present day: what
struck me immediately was the consistency of a 300,000 ‘floor’, which we have now approached, after which there
seems to be an almost historic tendency to bounce back up, sometimes, like in 1982, to the same dramatic levels
(nearly 700,000) as in 2009.
If this were a cycle, then, you would be right to ask what probability of breaking through this 300,000 floor
we could expect, given that, since 1974 (that is forty years of US labour history), we have not once broken
below this level.
Food for thought.
You are right and I doubt we will, I think we may see a steady advance form current levels closer to 400K by the end of the year.