The new level of continued claims would correspond to an unemployment rate of 6.1% without any additional convergence to the historical unemployment level. (edit: this estimated May level is the last point on the blue series in the graph.) If the end of EUI is creating a new trend with a more steeply declining unemployment rate, then this month could see another gap down, with an expected range of, say, 5.9% to 6.3%. The decline in continued claims may be a result of generally faster unemployment exit rates across unemployment durations, related to the end of EUI. If that is the case, then we should expect there to be a convergence to historical trends along with the decline in UI, since there should also be an increase in unemployment exit rates for unemployment of durations slightly over 26 weeks, in addition to the decline in unemployed workers who are still eligible for regular UI. So far, however, there appears to be a population of very long term unemployed whose exit rates remain very slow and, lacking a change in their own trend of employment behavior, will slow some of the convergence to historical levels until well into 2015.
If I am wrong about this new trend, and last month was mostly a noise event, we might be looking at an expected range of more like 6.1% to 6.5% in May.
Unemployment has always been a major problem in different countries. Looking at the graph it sure looks positive. Knowing that unemployment is now decreasing over the years.
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