jobless claims head north again

In case you haven't heard, it looks like the jobless filing for initial unemployment has risen this time around to the tune of 554,000 first time unemployment claims. That is an increase of 30,000 from the week prior. Now here comes the kicker - it looks like continuing unemployment claims are down by 88,000 less jobless filers. That's a good thing right. Generally speaking - yes. The problem is that this figure fails to provide insight on the reason for the decline in the continuing unemployment rate. Thus, you know what happens when you don't give details - people assume. In this case, folks assume that the 88,000 less jobless claims are due to those previous filers having found employment. Some percentage of the 88,000 figure have indeed found work. On the other hand, as has been said many times before - beware of these misleading statistics. What continuing unemployment figures fail to mention is how many on unemployment have exhausted all available benefits and both the federal and state level. Those people simply aren't counted and there are thousands of them out there. So the actual number of job seekers, out of work and looking for a job, is higher than the current number of roughly 6.2 million people unemployed. Beware of the fine print people.