Sorry folks, but millions of new unemployment claims is not "progress"

6 weeks after the first COVID-related jump in unemployment claims happened, and we are still seeing millions of first-time applicants with every report.

Almost 3.2 million people applied for unemployment benefits last week after the coronavirus cost them their jobs, but the historic wave of layoffs tied to the pandemic is receding.

The number of initial jobless claims processed in the week ended May 2 was less than half the crisis peak of 6.9 million at the end of March.

It’s cute how financial media try to portray this situation as “getting better”. These are FIRST-TIME CLAIMS, which means these people weren’t filing before. And it’s worth noting that before March, there hadn’t been a week where 1 million Americans filed new claims, let alone 3 million.

That 3.2 million also doesn’t include the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which allows workers in the gig economy and/or little work history to get benefits, since those individuals can’t get “regular” unemployment. PUA had 583,699 claims last week (and nearly 781,000 the week before), so add that to the regular unemployment claims, and the total of new claims is closer to 3.75 million. Which means that the decline shown in this picture isn't as large, since it doesn't count the large number of PUA claims over the last 2 weeks.

To me, the bigger indicator going forward is going to be total claims, which give an indication as to whether people are going back to work. That number keeps jumping as well.

The number of people collecting unemployment benefits, known as continuing claims, climbed to 22.6 million as of April 25 from 18 million in the prior week. These figures are reported one week behind initial claims.

That jump of 4.6 million continuing claims is the largest one-week increase since unemployment started spiking up in March.

While the new claims are usually the headline number that comes out every Thursday, the continuing claims number will likely give a better indication as to whether people are finding work after getting laid off, and to get an idea just how many people are out of work in this country.

There also was one other intriguing stat in the unemployment claims report, and my Congressman caught it.

Over one week last month, the number of people enrolled in work share jumped by 42%.

Up 122% in two weeks & 966% in a year.@WaysMeansCmte, expanding work share nationwide in is one of the quickest ways to stop layoffs & keep people on payrolls.

It should be in CARES 2. pic.twitter.com/fGovxvgB0B

— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) May 7, 2020

It's definitely a good thing that people are in work share as opposed to losing their jobs, but it also shows that things might even be worse than the unemployment figures let on. Because many people aren't out of work, but are working fewer hours and taking home less money.

Work share and related underemployment shows up in the U-6 figure of the monthly jobs report, which comes out tomorrow morning. The U-6 grew by twice as much as the headline U-3 increase in March, and let's see if the jump in U-6 outpaces what is likely to be a record one-month increase in the U-3 unemployment rate for April.

One other item about tomorrow's jobs report - that survey was in the 3rd week of April, and we've seen several million new claims since then. So while unemployment's increase will be huge in April, it seems likely that the rate will be even higher in May. And much like with the unemployment claims, just because the amount of the newly unemployed is going down, it still means things are getting worse, no matter how much hopium is being spread out by the coked-up hedge funders.