Churning at 60

As we have noted in prior posts, California's weekly new unemployment benefit claims data are stuck around 60,000 per week when something like 40,000 would be normal - at least based on past history. So, it seems as if there is a lot of extra churn in the state's labor market, with people going in and out of employment and filing claims when they go out. (It might be noted that the claims data above refer to "regular" payroll employees and not the "gig" accounts that accounted for much of the fraud in the state's system.) The extra churning may account for the fact that the state's unemployment rate has been consistently higher than the U.S. average during the recovery period. 

In any event, as always, the latest data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.