Extended Unemployment: Initial, Continued and Extended Unemployment Claims April 21 2011

Today’s jobless claims report showed a decline to both initial unemployment claims and continued unemployment claims as a significant declining trend continued to materialize for both initial and traditional continued claims.

Seasonally adjusted “initial” unemployment declined by 13,000 to 403,000 claims from last week’s revised 416,000 claims while seasonally adjusted “continued” claims declined by 7,000 resulting in an “insured” unemployment rate of 2.9%.

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 4.24 million people receiving federal “extended” unemployment benefits.

Taken together with the latest 3.94 million people that are currently counted as receiving traditional continued unemployment benefits, there are 8.18 million people on state and federal unemployment rolls.

Existing Home Sales Report: March 2011

Today, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released their Existing Home Sales Report for March showing a slight increase in sales while prices continue to be weak and inventory continues to remain elevated.

Single family home sales increased 3.97% since February but fell 6.51% below the level seen last year while prices declined a notable 5.31% below the level seen in March 2010.

Further, inventory of single family homes remains high climbing 0.7% from February but declining 1.3% below the level seen in March 2010 which, combined with the relatively slow pace of sales, resulted in a monthly supply of 8.1.

The following charts (click for full-screen dynamic version) shows national existing single family home sales, median home prices, inventory and months of supply since 2005.

Double-Digit Double-Jeopardy: Double Digit State Unemployment March 2011

The latest Regional and State Employment and Unemployment report showed that in March, 9 states were experiencing double digit unemployment with a median unemployment rate of 10.3% while the median unemployment rate for all 50 states and the District of Columbia stood at 8.4%.

Nevada showed the highest unemployment rate at 13.2% followed by California at 12% and Florida at 11.1%.