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Thursday, February 18, 2021

California's Wrong Way

Each Thursday, we check in on new weekly claims for unemployment insurance as an index of the direction of the labor market and economy. Through the week ending February 13, California seems to be going the wrong way. Claims have been increasing for the past three weeks. Even if we take the claims level of 4 weeks ago as artificially low, there is at least an index of a stalled economy - probably related to recent lockdown rules. 

At the national level, new claims were also up in the most recent week on a seasonally-adjusted basis and down slightly without adjustment. (Normal seasonal adjustments are suspect in an abnormal situation.) 

Below is the chart we have been updating weekly.


As always, the underlying data for the latest information is at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.

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