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Weekly Jobless Claims Fall: Here’s What You Need to Know

Oct. 25, 2012 9:30am Becket Adams

Weekly applications for U.S. unemployment aid fell last week to a seasonally adjusted 369,000, the Labor Department announced Thursday.

The report reflects unemployment benefit applications have dropped by 23,000, from a revised 392,000 the previous week. The four-week average, a less volatile measure, rose to 368,000.

Applications have fluctuated between 360,000 and 390,000 since January. At the same time, employers have added an average of nearly 150,000 jobs a month. That’s barely enough to lower the unemployment rate, which has declined from 8.3 percent to 7.8 percent this year.

Employers are hesitant to add more workers as long as growth remains tepid and Europe’s financial crisis threatens to push that region into recession. Many also are holding off because they are worrying about tax increases and government spending cuts that would kick in next year if Congress doesn’t reach a budget deal to avert them.

The weak job market has been a key topic in this year’s presidential election, which is down to its final days. Voters will have one final employment report to consider, which comes out four days before Election Day.

Unemployment has returned to the rate it was when President Obama took office because a government survey of households found a sizable increase in the number of people who had jobs. However, a jump in part-time employment accounted for most of the gain.

And this is how the unemployment claims data “looks like taken at face value and looked at from an adjusted, post-revision, standpoint,” Zero Hedge notes [John Lohman]:

Retail sales grew in September. And home sales and residential construction have steadily increased this year, helped by stable gains in home prices and the lowest mortgage rates in decades.

Still, the economy is not growing fast enough to generate much hiring. Growth slowed to a tepid annual rate of 1.3 percent in the April-June quarter, down from 2 percent in the previous quarter. Most economists see growth staying at or below 2 percent in the second half of the year. The Commerce Department will issue its first estimate of growth in the July-September quarter on Friday.

Follow Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) on Twitter

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Comments (37)

stillhere
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 4:36pm
Thanks porkpig for the advice- so like he should say he’s more like 34 instead of 54 and his wife thinks he’s super hot for an old guy oh and not to mention he’s a rocket scientist in disguise! lol
Good luck to you. We’re still here and still tyin’ and yes unemployment sucks!

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microace
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 3:14pm
Let’s see what usually happens at the end of October that causes a slight increase in employment…oh yeah…people start hiring holiday help for the Christmas holidays…geez.

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crusaderx9
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 1:05pm
“The four-week average [unemployment benefit applications], a less volatile measure, rose to 368,000.”

THAT is your story! NOT good news…

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- mtcountrygrl
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 3:10pm
  unemployment always goes down at the end of October. Christmas hiring folks, it’s temporary.
  
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- shimwood
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 3:22pm
  368,000 per WEEK X’s 4 WEEKS equals about 1,000,000 jobs. WOW, when Obummer took office it was a whopping 800,000 per month, but nobody syas anything about that. Then add 100,000 to 125,000 jobs PER MONTH and that is a good thing? These numbers are NEVER talked about at the same time. Anybody else out there think about this? None of the talk show (Glenn, Rush, FOX, etc) ever talk these numbers in the same context.
  
  Report this comment
Walkabout
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 12:49pm
No one called bullcrap on the chart.

That chart shows criminal fraud on the part of partisan government employees.

When Romney is elected he need to tell the American people what the true unemployment rate is & blame it on Obama.

To be vindictive? Not necessarily. Romney will have to in order to avoid holding the bag for Democrat lies. You know the presstitutes of the MSM will report the true U3 if a Republican is elected.starting in February 2013 & blame Republicans.

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Man-On-A-Mission
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:20am
Anytime there is good news regarding jobs…..GOP always has excuses….but when the numbers go their way they want to jump on the President…..I’m in IT and there are hundreds of job opening, but we haven’t done a good enough job of educating our kids….so companies like mine go and pay for work visas and foot the bill to bring in workers from India and China…..this is a joke…..put more money in education our kids so they can get these good jobs. You wonder why you see Asians and people from India driving nice cars and having nice houses…..there you have it!!!!!!!

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- smokeysmoke
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:31am
  that is rediculous, spending more on schools as we have done over the past 40 years has not helped in any way… there is something fundamentally wrong with our education system, where our students care more about having fun than learning, parents are absent in education, and the UNIONS protect horrible teachers and increase the costs of providing education by millions of dollars… saying we need to spend more so we have people who are less stuipid so we dont hire foriegn labor is an idoitic solution to this problem
  
  Report this comment
- AmazingGrace8
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:42am
  @SmokeySmoke
  
  I understand and agree with your smoke signal.
  
  Report this comment
- BeCrazyTimes
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:57am
  You make a very good point. I believe that the entire education system is flawed. The money tax payers contribute to education should be directed toward better resources for the students. In the area where we live our school tax rate is almost three times what the property tax rate is. They raise the school taxes every year and they are always broke. My kids were prepared for college but I know many high school graduates that either didn’t finish or struggled in college. I personally think the teachers union (not the teachers) is the biggest obstacle the students face.
  
  It’s a shame that with the unemployment situation we have in this country you can’t find qualified people.
  
  Report this comment
- The Jewish Avenger
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 12:03pm
  Maybe if we get back to basics and concentrate on Reading, Writing (Thats penmanship, spelling and grammar) and Arithmetic, maybe we can create a foundation for our kids to have a fighting competetive chance.
  
  Instead its liberal art programs.
  
  Heck, I’ll take civics but can we please stop the finger painting and macaroni craft crap when our kids cant even spell 5 letter words!!! They’re in the 4th grade now! We dropped that junk after Kindergarten because we started them on the “3 R’s” (Mind you, this is public school I’m talking about)
  
  I bet they can surf that iCrap that schools hand out now like its a breeze!
  Hows that eye to eye communication working for them?
  
  …Hello?
  
  The world may be changing but we dont need iRobots, we need individuals.
  
  Sorry I grew when people created those stupid school where there were teachers but they never taught anything and let do whatever they wanted. Now they do that but within parameters and call it “an education.”
  
  How low we’ve become…
  
  Report this comment
- SocialistSlayer
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 12:05pm
  @ Man – I don’t think you bothered to read the article ( maybe difficult to get past the headline?) Did you look at the Chart – It clearly shows the reality versus the government lies !
  
  Report this comment
- SCREW-WINDOWS
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 12:11pm
  Education can be improved if they taught Linux instead of Microshaft most foreign countries use Linux and you do too if you bank online use cell phones and other electronic gadgets or use google or this website.
  
  Report this comment
- mikem1969
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 12:55pm
  manboy on a mission, number one if you were in IT you would know how to look for patterns in any ad everything. About this time of year, every year, jobless claims drop because of the holiday season. You know, bussinesses hiring temporary employees to take up the slack from increased holiday and lead up to holiday sales? Come on man don’t give IT a bad name. Second, the only reason the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 was the fact that many people stopped looking for work, and others ran out of benefits. But I guesse you would not uderstand that since you can’t understand the holiday hiring pattern.
  
  Report this comment
- DarkJello
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 2:53pm
  Why should we spend even more $$ on our wasteful and corrupt ed system?
  
  We cannot buy our way into scholastic success! The functional unit of society is the family. That should be the launching point. If our families continue to fail at ever increasing rates, our performance against other countries will always, always, always be much inferior. That is a fact.
  
  Report this comment
barber2
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:05am
Funny. Job ” claims.” Never has one word has such a singular meaning before ! ” Claims.” That is all that we hear from the Obama Administration and their Lap Dog Media. Substance ? Truth ? No. We only get ” Claims.”

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- AmazingGrace8
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:58am
  Eric of “the five” has been investigating these phoney jobs numbers….so stay tuned….also The Blaze & Glen will discover more about the phoney numbers. The Final Countdown and whatever happens on November 6th….we are living in exciting times. If he is re-elected, grab your “bale-of-hay”. Why? I always thought (until someone told me differently) that when traveling around the Dakotas’ seeing bales of hay in ditches/canals, looked to me that if there is a “flash-flood” and you are there in the sudden storm, you can grab a bale of hay and “ride-out-the-storm”. Ok, ok…this is why I never ran for public office….Oh Wait…..LOL.
  
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- SCREW-WINDOWS
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 12:14pm
  They don’t count the ones who traded in unemployment for disability.
  
  Report this comment
Bobby D
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 10:52am
More lying propaganda from the desperate democaRATS! The unemployment rate, according to my contacts at The Bureau of Labor Stats, is still 9.7% and has been for four years. I believe this number and not the democRATS!

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Critters58
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 10:46am
Many of my friends who are over 50 have given up looking or have part time jobs working at grocery store or fast food places. They have had to move in with friends or other family members who are still working. So this is the great change Obama promised us? I am caring for an elderly parent who thank GOD saved and planned! She is paying for food and other cost so I am saving! Pray for America! If we repent and turn back to God he will prosper us again. Marriage is a covenant with man, woman, and GOD. Babies are to be raised and not aborted or murdered!

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Debra1776
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 10:33am
It is very important that once again Americans realize that California’s unemployment numbers are once again MISSING from this original unemployment number–conveniently, twice in a row–and it will go higher when California gets our act together. It will mean that thousands more will be on that publicized number, and few news people even mention the number after it gets adjusted in a few days.I am living in California and my city is closing shops and putting plywood on the windows so they do not get ripped off before they clean out their stores.
California is in real trouble and pandering to the average person that all is fine is not playing well to the people who live hear and know how much this state has to offer-in tourism alone. We have it all–beaches, mountains, the best wine country is America-and beating many French wines, cultural events in opera, plays and movies and we should not have one economic problem, BUT while one can push the social justice issues and complain, the largest problem we face is that our state adopted Obama’s cap and trade plan when it failed nationally and it is killing small business. So, I am sure that California is unable to give how many new unemployment there are this week (education-math skills may also be a recurring problem here) because there is no way to continue to spin these numbers into anything positive. The positive numbers will be at least, Obama 46% Romney 52%–a nice percentage so that we don’t have to tolerate a reco

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CynthiaCOG
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 10:20am
I too have lost my job, due to ObamaCare.. however I won’t be getting benefits because it will cost my employer and they are struggling as well. The Medical Transcription community (mostly women who work at home so they can be with their children) has all but been decimated due to Obamacare. Not for the good. No longer are physicians allowed to be physicians but mere chart takers and point and click medicine dispensers. Medical Transcriptionist are the ones who ensure your medical records are accurate. Now the EMR (electronic medical record) is computed, and not correctly. I spent a month or so editing Speech Recognition (which comes with nearly all EMR software) and for a diabetic patient who needs to take metropolol the computer speech recognition spit out propofanol (same drug that killed MJ). I edited only 1 physician from a 24-physician clinic. The errors were so bad that patients were clearly in danger of a misdiagnosis or drug error. I, for one, do not like this. As patients all of us should be asking for a pair of human eyes to review our medical records, not a computer. Thanks to EMR/ObamaCare not only do I not have a job, but you the patient do not have an accurate medical record. That is the hope and change I got.

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BlackCrow
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:55am
OK class let’s do a little simple math.

350X4= 1400 now add the zeros dropped for simplicity of calculation and you get 1,400,000 One million four hundred thousand people loosing their jobs every month now subtract the one hindered thousand new jobs created every month and you get a net increase in unemployment of 1.3 million a month. Multiplied out by the last ten months you have a loss of 13 million jobs since January and the unemployment rate is going down? We are being lied to and the sad thing is enough people failed third grade math that they BELIEVE the administration.

10 out of 10 idiots support Obama.

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- conservativeblackman
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 10:53am
  Right Blackcrow, but let us not for get the over 8.7 million jobless who now claim disability benefits. Yet, another way to shink the bogus unemployment number.
  
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cmac1332
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:54am
“Many also are holding off because they are worry about tax increases and government spending cuts that would kick in next year if Congress doesn’t reach a budget deal to avert them.” I see a grammar issue with this sentence.

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Airborne1966
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:48am
The Department of Labor is in Obama’s Pocket. These statistics are false. How do I know, I worked for the DOL for six months than left becuase of all the fudging of numbers. They do not count all those who have burned out their benefits. They add people that are working part-time jobs. They lie and lie over and over again. What do expect with the electuion so near. let’s make this POS Obama look good. The man has done nothing to improve employment except extend unemployment benefits for two years and believe it or not in some cases 3 years.

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- chucksue351
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:59am
  you were fired for not being able to spall
  
  Report this comment
sizzlinsexybeckster
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:44am
Maybe people are not filling out applications with the corrupt government because they make more money selling drugs to your kids or selling off their neighbor’s kids in the sex slave industry. Plus I’m sure they will make under the counter cash pretending to like Obama at his little gatherings outside or paid for voting for him. Or be paid to be part of the Golden Party. Other lazy mindless people age 35 probably still mooch their Mommy and Daddy and live in the basement.

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HKS
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:41am
When Obama’s EPA bricks fall on business in January that number will double and even triple. He aims to shut this country down and in January he will be well on his way, some will even say he will be there.

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- AmazingGrace8
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 11:48am
  These are very serious times but just for giggles when the money stops flowing into DC, invision this…..pres.obama “hocking” the Air Force One and driving around in a Smart Car.
  
  Report this comment
Snowleopard {gallery of cat folks}
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:41am
Obama and the left will claim this is more ‘success’ of the insane policies of our president. One more proof of the pathological lies of Obama.

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- Popp40
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:53am
  @Snowleaopard…..you are failing to look at this from the left and Obama’s perspective. This is a success in what they are trying to set up. Sad thing is that the MSM is walking hand and hand with them and is not taking a impartial stanve on this and reporting the truth. They want this president and the left to succeed but I have not figured out why, because if he does and MSM ever steps out of line they will have the boot of surpression come stopping down on their necks.
  
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PorkPIG
Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:33am
Yeah and my former company Just Laid me and 174 other ppl off . BTW it is a direct result of Obama and his EPA regime .

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- Popp40
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 9:48am
  Come on we all know it is really Bush’s fault.
  
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- mecmelton
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 12:58pm
  Are you in Missouri? My wife’s company just laid off that many people because of that wonderful job killing, money pit of a tax packed, unconstitutional, criminal, obamacare. Impeach the criminal and reverse all his policies.
  
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- stillhere
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 1:55pm
  My husband was laid off in February. The company he worked for here in Id. has done nothing but steady “lay-offs”since. He has put out nearly 100 resumes and hasn’t even had one interview. The guys he was laid off with are having the same experience. Jobs? What jobs!
  
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- PorkPIG
  Posted on October 25, 2012 at 3:25pm
  PA , I machined new parts for the large truck manufacturers . I have had multiple Interviews already in the past 2 weeks I’ve been laid off , Places are are actually finding my resume and calling me .I’ve reinvented myself a few times in the last 15yrs so that my skill set fits large arena of employment opportunities , I’ll the do the same to find a job and get out of the Unemployment line .
  @ Stillhere , Tell your husband this , Put something Crazy , or Cocky or humorous in the objective line , You have to do what ever it takes to get noticed and also remembered , HR managars have thousands resumes to go through and they all start to look the same .
  
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