New claims for jobless benefits ticked upward last week by 3,000, to 608,000, the Department of Labor reports. For a sense of scale, consider that last week's number was revised upward by 4,000. The overall trend in new claims is still downward, if painfully slowly.
Keep your eye on those continuing claims, though, meaning the pool of people who've been canned and haven't yet found work. This time, those claims fell by 148,000, but they'd climbed by 78,000 the week before. It's hard to tell what to make of that, exactly. Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Ecnomics takes a stab. He writes that continuing claims "lag initial claims by a few weeks; they ought to be falling now given that initial claims peaked more than two months ago."
After the jump, why so many people still can't get a job.
The gap between openings and hires suggests the companies are filling what vacancies exist from within, never posting the job for outsiders.
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