ShareIn each Economic Update, the Research staff analyzes recently released economic indicators and addresses what these indicators mean for REALTORS® and their clients. Today’s update discusses jobless claims.
- After three weeks of showing a rising trend, initial claims for unemployment insurance for the week ending Sept 1 dropped by 12,000 claims to 365,000 from the previous week’s revised (upward) estimate. As a caveat, weekly data are volatile and the numbers are subject to revisions which have tended to be upward in the past year. The less volatile 4-week moving average is now at 371,000, unchanged from the past week. The number of insured unemployed, or those with continuing unemployment claims, is roughly unchanged at 3.3 million.
- The fact that initial claims and the number of long term unemployed have remained fairly constant indicates that the pace at which the economy is shedding jobs has now stabilized. What is needed now is a faster pace of job creation to steadily shrink the pool of unemployed.
- On separate data, ADP, a company that processes paychecks for many corporations, reported today that jobs increased by 201,000 from July to August. ADP data is limited in coverage but has a high correlation (0.95) with the Bureau of Labor’s official employment data, which will be released tomorrow. NAR expects about 4 million cumulative job gains this year and next, thereby raising potential demand for homebuying and commercial real estate occupancy.
