The advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims, for the week ending February 20, was 730,000. This is a decrease of 111,000 from the previous week’s revised level.
- The insured unemployment rate was 3.1% for the week ending February 13, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the previous week’s unrevised rate
Economists had projected that initial jobless claims would hold nearly steady according to a Wall Street Journal survey.
How could economists be so wrong? Well, they might not be. The deadly winter storms that hit Texas and other states could be messing with the numbers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the storms, “could have made difficult for people to file claims and for state governments to process them.”
So watch next week not only for the numbers but also for the revisions.
