Initial Jobless Claims Likely to Miss Consensus this Week

This upcoming Thursday, September 3rd, the initial jobless claims report for the week ending 8/28 will be released. Initial claims have been trending downward over the past weeks, which is a positive sign for the economy, as job retention has been looking fairly stable.

The consensus pick for this week's data is a continuing trend downward, with an expectation around a 1.5% drop. Looking at the search data, however, indicates that there was a sharp increase in searches for key unemployment-driven queries.

On July 16th, we posted the correlation between key searches for unemployment and jobless claims. While it is unlikely that this week's jobless claims release will increase by 18% (as searches have week over week), it is highly likely that the concensus pick will miss the mark in the wrong direction.

[PLEASE NOTE THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT NEW, CONTRARY DATA]