Initial Jobless Claims Surge To Highest Since November

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time last week was 262k, notably higher than the 248k the prior week. That is the highest since Nov26 2021.

Source: Bloomberg

Notably, continuing claims are starting to pick up also and is now at its highest in over 4 months.

The states with the biggest increases were MA (+7,447), CA (+4,399) and NJ (786), while the biggest declines were in CT (-6,323), MI (-1,260) and GA (-823).

One could be forgiven for wondering just WTF is going on in the main payrolls data…

Source: Bloomberg

Still given the mainstream push to claim there is ‘no inflation’ after yesterday’s 0.0% MoM CPI print, who knows what the arbiters of what is acceptable speech will allow us to claims this time…