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Saturday, January 15, 2022

Not a Promising Start for the New Year

The year 2022 didn't start well in California, at least as measured by the labor-market indicator we have been following: new weekly claims for unemployment insurance. We're still floating around 60,000 weekly claims when "normal" would be around 40,000. Thus, there continues to be a detachment between the budget situation - in which the governor has been spreading money among various programs - and the underlying economy. And with inflation heating up, there could be moves to discontinue monetary stimulus and to step on the economic brakes at the national level, the effects of which would filter down to California.

As always, the new claims data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.

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