It’s time again to look at the trends in claims for unemployment insurance benefits. We pay attention to claims for unemployment insurance benefits because they’re fairly raw and unruly data that give a good warning about an oncoming recession. The data is not based on surveys, but on actual claims for unemployment benefits, and it reacts a notch more quickly then the huge monthly pile of survey-based data in the jobs report .
The number of people who are still claiming unemployment insurance benefits at least one week after the initial application – people who haven’t found a job yet – started rising out of the historic trough from late 2022 through March 2023. But by summer 2023, the number stabilized at what is still a historically low level, currently at 1.78 million.
What this labor market is telling us recession watchers here is that there is still no recession in sight, and we’ll just have to keep watching for it.
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