Now that Bernanke has thrown in the towel and reverted back to the old bad news is good news regime (or did he - GETCO's vacuum tubes at least sure seem to think so), there was hardly anything more the market could ask for than a horrible Initial Claims print. It got just that with today's initial unemployment claims which soared from last week's upward revised 344K (only +1k revision this time) to 360K, well above the consensus (and Joe LaVorgna) forecast of 340K. Sure enough, the BLS said the July claims were difficult to seasonally adjust, so let's look at the NSA claims which jumped by 49,778 in the week ended July 6 to 384,829 making one wonder if the BLS' instruction in the holiday shortened week was to actually represent a worse economic reality unlike during the Obama pre-reelection months. The only other notable item in the report was the ongoing drop in Extended claims, with EUCs down by 23K to just 1.6 million, 1 million less than a year ago as claims exhaustion means ever more people drop out of the official labor pool. Permanently.
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