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(snip)"Initial Claims, which were obviously revised higher from 410K to 413K, dropped well below expectations, printing at 391K, on expectations of 405K. With claims continuing to hug the 400K line, this means that unfortunately the economy is not creating nearly enough jobs: as a reminder per the CBO, the US needs to create over 100K jobs a month just to stay in line with population growth. Continuing claims dropped from an (upward) revised 3935K to 3790K, as more and more people hit the 6 month continuing benefits cliff. They also are hitting the end of their 99 week extension period: those on extended benefits dropped by -111,087. That said, with California claims data partially estimated, and all of Massachusetts, Hawaii and Oklahoma data based entirely on the wind, this data has the credibility of an NAR [ National Association of Realtors - sic ] report.
And while the employment picture was better than expected, the capital goods data was a total disaster: January US Capital Goods orders non-defense ex. aircraft plunged by -6.9% M/M on expectation of just a -1.0% drop (Prev. 1.4% Rev. 4.3%). And just excluding Transportation, durable goods collapsed by 3.6% on expectations of a 0.5% increase. Time for those downward GDP revisions.(snip)
Note the math here - 111,087 formerly unemployed people exceeded their 99 week unemployment benefit limit this month ... they are not counted towards the 391k in new unemployment claims ( since their unemployment benefit eligibility has now been exhausted ), nor are they any longer counted as being unemployed under the gov't's official U1 unemployment rate. Also note the ( actually accurate ) CBO statistic that 100,000 new jobs need to be created each and every month just to offset the number of new workers entering the US labor force due to population growth and immigration - thus a 20k drop in new unemployment claims is actually still 80k short of 'breaking even' in terms of real unemployment levels even if one ignores the 111k who simply 'disappeared'.
The durable goods data is actually much more distressing ... because it tends to indicate that, ex big ticket items like cars and aircraft, US consumer spending on 'non-essential' items is still dropping sharply. This is potential bad news for dancers attempting to sell 'non-essential' services to those same consumers.



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