Initial Jobless Claims Dipped Last Week After MA Fraud Fix

After the prior week’s jump in jobless claims (which was later excused by Massachusetts explaining their data was all fraudulent), last week saw initial claims drop notably to 242k (lower than the 251k exp).

Source: Bloomberg

And sure enough the decline was all Massachusetts…

After last week’s surge…

The 4-week (smoothed) average of initial claims remains at its highest since Nov 2021…

Source: Bloomberg

Additionally, continuing claims dipped back below 1.8 million for the first time since the first week of March.

It seems the transmission mechanism of The Fed’s policy tightening continues to be broken…or uneven.

Finally, bear in mind that the claims data has just had another major revision as COVID manipulations are removed…

In other words, who knows what the real data actually looked like for the last three years.