Revisiting unemployment claims for week ending September 15

Last time, I drew your attention to the unemployment claims report for the week ending September 15 which said:

In the week ending September 15, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 382,000, a decrease of 3,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 385,000.

But, the previous week's first guess was 382,000, meaning, in fact, it is not appropriate to claim any kind of change. Two days from now, we will get a new press release which will provide the revised number for the week ending September 15. Only then are we going to be able to say if initial unemployment claims actually went down between September 8th and September 15th (my guess is they didn't—In fact, I expect them to have gone up, but that's beside the point).

Well, the press release for week ending September 22 was released a few days ago, and the revised number for the week ending September 15 is 385,000.

That means, there was no change in initial unemployment claims between September 15 and September 22. But, there are now countless cloned posting on the web, indicating another week with falling unemployment claims.

Now, the advance number for the week ending September 22 came much lower than I had anticipated:

In the week ending September 22, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 359,000, a decrease of 26,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 385,000.

In any case, here's the chart for unemployment claims since Memorial Day this year, with this recent bit of information incorporated:

An oddity

While looking up something else, I noticed the following oddity. In the first week of 2011, there were two news releases: One on January 5, 2011, and another on January 6, 2011. Here's what they said:

In the week ending December 31, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 372,000, a decrease of 15,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 387,000

In the week ending Jan. 1, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 409,000, an increase of 18,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 391,000.

Weird!