US jobless claims drop by 12,000 after being plagued with shutdown and glitches
After no jobs data we're now back to getting messy data.
Before the US government shutdown computer issues in California were playing havoc with jobless claim numbers. Now that the political squabbles have been dealt with (at least temporarily) the statisticians still have to deal with that backlog.
So we've seen a lot of revisions in this week's release – and that might be a trend for a while longer.
The US Department of Labor says that initial jobless claims dropped from 362,000 (revised from 358,000) to 350,000 in the week ended 19 October. That's a miss on estimates of a drop to 340,000.
Continuing jobless claims drop to 2.874m from 2.882m (revised from 2.859m) in the week ending 12 October.