Job cuts up and jobless claims down? Nothing adds up

Can you reconcile these two data bits about the jobs market that both came out today?

Part 1 - The Weekly jobless claims report.

In the week ending February 1, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claimswas 202,000, a decrease of 15,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 1,000 from 216,000 to 217,000. The 4-week moving average was 211,750, a decrease of 3,000 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 250 from 214,500 to 214,750.

Wow, that's the lowest unemployment claims have been in since last April, both for last week and the 4-week average.

But within an hour, we got this contrasting picture.

Job cuts announced by U.S.-based employers jumped 106%, from December’s total of 32,843 to 67,735, the highest monthly total since February 2019, according to a report released Thursday from global outplacement and business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

Last month’s total is 27.8% higher than the 52,988 cuts announced in the same month last year. It is the highest total since February 2019, when employers announced 76,835 cuts.

So there's been a massive increase in the number of announced job cuts, but unemployment claims are going down. Is this just a lag between the announcements and the actual layoffs, or are there so many barriers put in place to keep people from getting unemployment that it's artificially keeping claims down?

US Rep. Katie Porter gave a great example of those barriers today when she showed the former administrator of Maine's Food Stamp program just how much info Mainers had to provide and come up with in order to get SNAP.

This is incredible. @RepKatiePorter held up Maine’s SNAP Benefits eligibility form and asked the conservative who ran the program to disclose the same intrusive and burdensome info required by the form.#ProtectKids pic.twitter.com/DZa2bD5Pah

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) February 6, 2020

We also get the long-awaited January jobs report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which not only is big in seeing how 2020 started in the jobs market, but also because we get benchmark revisions for all of 2019. And UW's Menzie Chinn says prior data indicates that 2019's figures are likely to be revised down by quite a bit.

Here are 3 guesses of what employment trajectory will look like w/tomorrow's benchmk revision: green is based on QCEW, chartreuse is BLS experimental series using household survey to mimic NFP, pink is my guess of what BLS will do "wedging in" revisions. Bold blue is reported pic.twitter.com/EDsP37ZfgN

— Menzie Chinn (@menzie_chinn) February 6, 2020

I keep looking at all the Bubbly positivity about the economy and the stock market, and it doesn't make much sense to me. Let's see if tomorrow's revisions give a bit of clarity.