US Jobless Claims Edge Up as Q1 GDP Revised Higher

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May 25, 2023 11:54 · 27k Views

Initial unemployment claims increased by 4,000 to 229,000 in the week ended May 20, Labor Department data showed. GDP rose at a revised 1.3% annualized pace in the first quarter. Mike McKee reports on "Bloomberg Surveillance."

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  • 00:00 Right now two hundred and twenty nine thousand jobla claims last week that is down from the prior week's initial release of two hundred and forty two thousand but we'VE got to see here ah what the actual revision is going To Be because as we mentioned Massachusetts reported fraud and it's initial claims numbers about fourteen thousand three hundred a week just had been haded in so over the course of.
  • 00:30 The last twelve weeks that's about thirty five thousand yet the revision now goes to two twenty five from last week so last week instead of being two forty two was two twenty five so we actually go up by four thousand if you want to figure out what that means for the economy in the markets go ahead I know it was struggling to do that but it does suggest some problems with jobless claims as a sort of canary to tell us something about the labor market can we look at the.
  • 01:00 Second view of GDP numbers coming out which I think is a sprightly report which may be that market reaction well we do see the GDP the second report first revision one point three percent for the first quarter that is up from one point one percent initially reported and it does look like a lot of that is consumer spending up three point eight percent versus three point seven percent we're gonna have to check and see the details of that to see how much of that is inventories as well which was a big deal.
  • 01:30 In the the earlier report but it does suggest that we are seeing stronger growth in the us and everybody had anticipated help me here with the animal spirit is seen by personal consumption ticking up in a second look well one of the big things is a nonreial fixed investment basically business spending which had been ah very low revised up to one point four percent so a little healthier than it had been and a consumer spending higher.
  • 02:00 So overall the economy going into the second quarter was running a little bit stronger than had been initially thought which suggests that it may not unrealistic that we see ah some reasonable growth in the second quarter the Atlanta f gd p now number which is that it's it's way too preliminary to put alot of stock in it but it has us growing at two point nine percent in the second quarter my coliable are some of these data points especially given potential fraud potential revisions that have been all over the map.
  • 02:30 Well it does suggest that jobless claims around the country have an issue we saw a lot of fraud during the pandemic and that really pushed up a lot I mean we got twenty million jobless claims and now they're saying maybe half that ah so we really don't know and a lot of these jobless claim systems in these states we did find out during the pandemic are running on very old computers and they don't have a very good verification system and states have chopped their spending on it so they have fewer people to verify who.
  • 03:00 Are getting the benefits and so it does call into question sort of the whole jobless claims shall we call it structure rather ricketney structure we did see continuing claims not revised uh they were about one million seven hundred ninety nine thousand last week this week one million seven ninety four so a very little change in that does suggested a few of those people fell out so we're not seeing a declining deteriorating trend as we.
  • 03:30 Thought in Java.