So jobless claims “rising sharply” are a sign “of a labor market that is slowly healing”????? LOL. We must have been in an economic boom over the past 4 years then!! Gotta love that Reuters spin.
In the next few months, maybe for the next year, you are going to see a strange phenomenon. The unemployment rate will continue to come down sharply, while the weekly jobless claims number stays relatively static. This is NOT due to large numbers of currently unemployed people finding work. Well, not really, anyway. What I think is happening is that employers across the country are beginning to cut workers down from full time to part time. Those workers know they can’t go somewhere else and get a new full time job, so they just have to accept their new reality. When two workers are cut from 40 hours to 25 hours in order to keep from being labeled as “full time,” then you’ve taken 80 hours of work that was being done before and you only have 50 hours being done now. What do you do, as an employer? Easy - you bring back someone who was previously laid off, but now, they are hired at 25 hours per week, like the other employees you’ve cut from full to part time. Because these people were most likely people who worked at these companies fairly recently, they are still on unemployment, so when they are rehired, they decrease the unemployment rate.
As this happens, you would see EXACTLY what we are starting to see - a dramatic decrease in the “official” unemployment figure, while nothing else seems to point to massive job creation. It’s a shuffling of the deck chairs that businesses are engaging in right now in an effort to decrease their healthcare costs due to Obamacare.
I would love to get these thoughts to the Romney campaign. I don’t see anyone talking about this shift, but it’s the only explanation that makes any sense of these numbers.