After taking a breather last week, the labor market came roaring back this week.Taking a look at the YoY trend in NSA initial claims over the last five weeks, they look like this (newest to oldest): -8.9%, -1.3%, -10.5%, -9.7%, -12.1%. That is an extraordinarily strong run.
The real takeaway, however, remains that the YoY rate of improvement in rolling NSA claims continues to accelerate in 2013. This is different than what we've seen in the prior three years. The chart below shows this. The black dotted line shows that the slope in the rate of claims improvement is negative for 2013, whereas 2010, 2011 and 2012 all had positive slopes (a negative slope in this instance is better as it means the rate of improvement is accelerating).
