Last week another 680,000 people applied for UI. This included 547,000 who applied for regular state UI (seasonally adjusted) and 133,000 who applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA). 1/ https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf ">https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.p...
Claims are extremely high, but slowly moving in the right direction. The 680,000 who applied for UI last week was a decrease of 37,000 from the prior week. The 4-week moving average of total initial claims decreased by 55,000. 2/
Last week was the 57th straight week total initial claims were higher than the 10th-worst week of the Great Recession (GR). (If you restrict to regular state claims—because we didn’t have PUA in the GR—initial claims are still nearly 3 times where they were before COVID.) 3/