Extended Unemployment: Initial, Continued and Extended Unemployment Claims December 29 2011

Yesterday’s jobless claims report showed increases to both initial and continued unemployment claims as seasonally adjusted initial claims remained below the 400K level for the fourth consecutive week.

Seasonally adjusted “initial” unemployment increased 15,000 to 381,000 claims from last week’s revised 366,000 claims while seasonally adjusted “continued” claims increased by 34,000 resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 2.8%.

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 3.49 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.

Taken together with the latest 3.62 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are 7.12 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.