This morning’s jobless claims number showed a week-over-week decrease of 5000 to 330,000 from 335,000, beating expectations from economists. While the recent data points for the labor market and US economy have been nothing short of spectacular, we question whether the labor market itself is beginning to weaken.
On a rolling, year-over-year basis, the improvement in the latest week slipped to -4.3% from -7.0% the week prior and -9.7% the week prior to that. We've long argued that looking at the rolling NSA data is a better barometer of the underlying health of the labor market because there are so many errors currently plaguing the seasonally-adjusted data.
