Intitial jobless claims drop, but continued claims rise

Today’s jobless claims report showed a notable decline to initial unemployment claims and an increase to continued unemployment claims while seasonally adjusted initial claims remained below the closely watched 400K level.

Seasonally adjusted “initial” declined to 377,000 claims from last week’s revised 389,000 claims while seasonally adjusted “continued” claims increased by 34,000 resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 2.6%.

Since the middle of 2008 though, two federal government sponsored “extended” unemployment benefit programs (the “extended benefits” and “EUC 2008” from recent legislation) have been picking up claimants that have fallen off of the traditional unemployment benefits rolls.

Currently there are some 2.82 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.

Taken together with the latest 3.06 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are 5.88 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.