TechFlow news, October 17 — According to unadjusted state-level claims data released during the U.S. government shutdown, initial jobless claims in the United States declined last week. Bloomberg's analysis of the data shows that for the week ended October 11, initial claims were approximately 215,000, down from an estimated 234,000 the previous week. Due to the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Labor has not issued its weekly unemployment report since September 25 but has continued to provide downloadable data for most states. This estimate applied seasonally adjusted factors pre-released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to adjust the raw figures.
This methodology closely aligns with official seasonally adjusted data when all state reports are available. However, the latest weekly data for Arizona, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Tennessee were missing and were replaced with the average of the prior four weeks. Calculations indicate that continuing claims rose slightly to 1.93 million for the week ended October 4, up from an estimated 1.92 million the previous week. (Jinshi)
