Jobless benefits: More than 9 million on unemployment
Today’s jobless claims report showed an increase to initial claims and an decrease to continued claims with a continued trend-up appearing to shape up for initial claims while traditional continued claims appears to be trending down.
Seasonally adjusted “initial” unemployment increased by 12,000 to 465,000 claims from last week’s revised 453,000 claims while “continued” claims declined by 48,000 resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 3.5%.
Since the middle of 2008 though, two federal government sponsored “extended” unemployment benefit programs (the “extended benefits” and “EUC 2008” from recent legislation) have been picking up claimants that have fallen off of the traditional unemployment benefits rolls.
Currently there are some 5.17 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.
Taken together with the latest 3.93 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are 9.10 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.
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