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ICSA

The Case for UnemploymentUnemployment is tricky. You just cannot announce high unemployment. The political damage is too much to take. But unfortunately, the time comes when unemployment just increases... Every sane person would want the economy to remain calm for as long as possible. This is not sinister or bad. After all, it is in the duty of Governments and Central Banks to keep our daily lives as calm and peaceful as possible. Bad unemployment data is inherently bad. It is worse than bad inflation data. So it is always a tricky situation... After the inflation chaos, calm has return to the financial world. Volatility and inflation is lower, equities are higher! So all is well! Not only inflation is lower, but also unemployment! With an ultra-low rate of 3.4%. News just couldn't be better! Initial claims is also breaking down, signaling better days ahead... After all, low unemployment is good! Right? Not so fast fella! Low unemployment is good for, well, employees! But it is bad for corporations! Finding skilled personnel is incredibly hard. So much so, that most companies underperform. They just can't grow! I believe that unemployment does not necessarily break the economy. And the economy does not necessarily break the unemployment. It is a mixed bag... Sometimes, businesses benefit from high unemployment. If the antagonists fail, others get their workers, and most importantly, the piece of the pie! Some companies grow while others fail... Believe it or not, low unemployment is risky. Especially when it is in a 54 year low... It just cannot go lower! Recent unemployment data is perfect. However, Continuous Jobless Claims (USCJC) may give us a new perspective... It is at times like these when we see conflicting data. Continuous Claims increase while unemployment rate is decreasing. At that period, the official unemployment rate was making lower lows! This is deeply concerning. Especially when it is eerily similar to 2020. Perhaps it is a shift of balance right before a crisis. Perhaps a period when long-term employees lose their jobs since companies attempt to cut down costs. Instead, they hire less skilled workers with lower wages, perhaps for part-time jobs. This may be the last attempt of companies to stay afloat. It is also the last attempt for families to stay afloat. High food prices necessitate work at all costs, no matter how low... A crisis may be brewing... A Black Swan one, just like 2020. The Big Tech bubble is literally hollow, full of derivatives aka weapons of mass destruction. And the scale and the ramifications of such a crisis are still unknown. (By inflation pressure I mean the amount of work the FED does to fight inflation. While this chart increases, inflation gets out of hand) Perhaps all of this is meaningless. Only time will tell what will happen... WW3 commence I guess? Tread lightly, for this is hallowed ground. -Father Grigori
ECONOMICS:USCJC
by akikostas
3
Initial Claims UpdateToday's read (not accounted for in this chart) is starting to make this a bit worrying. ICSA rising again week over week, threatening to break momentum. ICSA is a noisy indicator, but if you simply add smoothing with a moving average calculation, it becomes a better version of the unemployment rate. I say it's better because it's not subject to data issues such as workforce participation rate or other such issues that may skew the data a bit. Beyond that, ICSA leads the unrate from a data perspective, so it's a bit more of an advanced indicator. For this indicator, I like to use the 52 week (1 year) EMA and the 26 week (1/2 year) EMA to smooth things out. This HAS crossed in the past 10 years temporarily during some big unemployment swings from hurricanes. So it's important to understand those as just temporary false signals, and not anything real going on with the economy. Right now however, we clearly have no hurricanes going on, and we're getting very close to a cross, which is a pretty damn good sell signal.
FRED:ICSA
by GTStockmaster
Unemployment / Initial claims momentum for recession watchingUnemployment data is clearly one of if not the most important data sets when it comes to predicting a recession. With unemployment at very long term lows, when does this break, and what happens when it does? For me, I watch exponential moving average crossovers in unemployment data. Initial claims works if you smooth it out (it's a high frequency data series). The key takeaway with unemployment is that it tends to trend strongly. Once a direction is established, it will usually keep heading in that direction. Right now, the shorter-term moving average here is curling upward rather fast as we've heard about a series of big layoffs (GM) and potential weakness in the economy. Is this the start of something bigger? We'll have to wait and see of course, I watch for a cross and then sustained upward movement. When an economy gets tight due to inflation, higher interest rates, higher wage costs, and lower demand for big ticket items (as seen in autos, homes, etc) companies eventually are forced to lay people off. As you can probably see, this easily becomes a feedback loop in the economy. When laying off people reaches a high enough point, that affects the demand portion of the consumer economy, which then starts to affect companies bottom and top lines. This then forces more layoffs, defaulting in the credit cycle, etc etc. Basically, once unemployment picks up momentum, it almost always leads to a recession.
FRED:ICSA
by GTStockmaster