Continuing Jobless Claims Surges To 2 Year High

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time last week jumped to 231k (from an upwardly revised 218k), up to its highest since August...

Source: Bloomberg

Massachusetts and New York saw the biggest increase in claims while Oregon and Georgia saw the largest decrease...

Worse still, continuing claims keeps rising, to 1.864mm - the highest since November 2021...

Source: Bloomberg

And it's going to get worse, as Goldman reminds us that ongoing seasonal distortions have increasingly weighed on the level of continuing claims over the last six months, and we now expect that the reversal of those distortions could exert a cumulative boost of 375k to the level of continuing claims between now and March.

We're gonna need more seasonal adjustments.