Jobless Claims Rise; Long-Term Jobless Trend Worsens; Reuters/Yahoo See Silver Lining

Remember: the magic number is 400,000

Yahoo!Finance headline for Reuters story: Jobless Claims Rise as Labor Market Heals Slowly
The Reuters headline for the same story: Weakness in labor, factory data sends dour data

The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week while U.S. manufacturing improved only slightly in August, worrisome signs for an economy struggling to create enough jobs.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 372,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

Okay, now the spin:

Despite the increase in new claims filed last week, the data on layoffs did have a silver lining. [this I have to see]

The data covers the same week looked at by the government for its monthly measure of employment, and showed a slight drop in layoffs from the survey week last month, which is a mildly positive signal for hiring in August. ["mildly positive"? who are they trying to kid?]

The four-week moving average for new claims, a measure of labor market trends, was 368,000 last week. That was a slight increase from the prior week, but still 2.1 percent lower than in the second week of July. [not even the trend helped this time. wow!]

So, here we go again. Jobless claims rise and the headline suggests the labor market is healing, albeit slowly. Not only that, the jobless claims, which unexpectedly rose, had a silver lining.

Okay.

An interesting bit of trivia: every week when jobless claims rose this past year, Yahoo/Reuters said that the long-term trend was improving. This is the first week in many, many weeks that the long-term trend actually worsened.

And the headline writers saw a silver lining. I have read that "silver lining paragraph" half a dozen times and I don't see the silver lining.

Anyway, enough of this for now; need to load the new IPs for the day.