While largely noise in the context of the big picture, last week's multi-year low in initial claims of 320K (revised upward as usual to 323K), driven in big part by the specific furlough situation at the automakers, reversed and rose by 13K to 330K, or 6K higher than expectations. This was the highest claims number since July 19, the biggest miss to expectations and also the largest weekly jump in 6 weeks. Notably, the entire move was due to seasonal adjustments: the unadjusted claims number declined even more, dropping from 283K to 279K, although with the market at a point where bad news is desperately needed to provide even the tiniest bounce to risk, the adjustment is now meant to distort the underlying data lower not higher.
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Continuing claims were also worse than expected at 2999K, up from 2970K, and missing expectations of 2963K, which also should provide some fuel to the early futures ramp. Sadly the miss wasn't much bigger or else the entire plunge yesterday could have been undone on horrible economic data.
Incidentally, if the bad news chasing market could think beyond a mere flashing headline, and were to look at the cumulative trend in initial claims net of weekly revisions, it would be limit up as the following chart courtesy of @not_jim_cramer below show just how bad the claims data truly is if one track the prior week revisions instead of the current weekly report.
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