We have been tracking new weekly claims for unemployment insurance as a labor-market indicator of the general direction of the US and California economies. But California froze new claim applications, trying to catch up with a big backlog of unprocessed claims. The result is a distortion of the national numbers and no information on what is happening within the state. The national figures seem to indicate a stall, but without California - the largest state by far - it's hard to say.
Maybe next week we will have a better sense of what is happening when the freeze ends. But the ongoing problems in California claim processing don't provide a lot of confidence. For details on those problems:
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?e=cd8ca92ba1&u=5f4af3af825368013c58e4547&id=f09a8f79e2
As usual, the latest claims data, such as they are, are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.
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