Extended Unemployment: Initial, Continued and Extended Unemployment Claims March 18 2010

Today’s jobless claims report showed a slight decline to initial claims while also indicating a small increase to the continued claims series while continued claims including extended benefits appear to be continuing to mount.

Seasonally adjusted “initial” unemployment claims declined by 5,000 to 457,000 claims from last week’s revised 462,000 claims while “continued” claims increased by 12,000 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 6 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.

Taken together with the latest 5.5 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are well over 11 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.

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