Time to Panic! Unemployment Insurance Claims Jump to 399,000

It looks like unemployment is on the rise again, new claims for unemployment insurance jumped to 399,000 last week. That is 24,000 more than the consensus forecast and also 24,000 more than the prior week's number. So let's see some of those shrill talking heads getting scared -- real bad news for President Obama's re-election prospects.

Of course folks who know some economics remember that the December data showed a peculiar jump of 42,000 jobs in the courier industry in December. The same thing happened last year. Last year, all those jobs disappeared in January. And last year there was a jump in claims of 19,000 for the second week in January. Let's see if we can guess what this all means.

"What this all means"
written by Paul, January 12, 2012 8:55 AM

Is that we are bouncing along the bottom of the Great Recession and until the housing market recovers, there is no end in sight for high unemployment and slow economic growth.

At some point, the federal government may follow Keynes' advice by acting to stimulate consumption in the housing market like it did with Cash-4-Clunkers in the auto market. Or maybe not.

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written by PeonInChief, January 12, 2012 8:57 AM

What's interesting is that post-holiday layoffs are a bit early. Usually they don't happen until mid-month. Probably that's simply the result of the careful planning of retailers--there's just not that much stuff left.

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written by skeptonomist, January 12, 2012 9:34 AM

It is certainly peculiar when a single type of job can apparently mean the difference between contraction and expansion, and possibly change the direction of the national debate. And where did all those jobs come from - who is hiring all these courier/messengers at Christmas time? Or is it some other kind of end-year phenomenon? Why should hand delivery be more important as all kinds of documents are shifting to electronic form? And why would BLS experts overlook the growth of these jobs in their seasonal corrections, considering that it was the BLS which collected the data?

If we ignore the weekly media hype, the trend of new claims seasonally adjusted is clearly downward:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ICSA?cid=32240

Couriers don't seem to have much influence on this. The decline is not nearly as great as after the recessions of 1974-83 when the recessions were caused by the Fed, but is not notably worse than in other recessions since 1965.

Skeptonomist
written by S. D. Jeffries, January 12, 2012 9:55 AM

To answer your question regarding who is hiring all these couriers/messengers, think FedEx, UPS, USPS and other delivery services. All these companies that deliver products ordered online or delivered locally are classified as couriers.

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written by liberal, January 12, 2012 10:03 AM

Adding to S. D. Jeffries' comment, I think Dean implied in a previous recent post that
(a) couriers include delivery guys,
(b) the run-up is probably due to the increasing importance of shopping retail over the internet,
(c) it's not captured by seasonal adjustment by BLS yet because it's too new a phenomenon.

Time to Panic! Unemployment Insurance Claims Jump to 399,000

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