Estimates show U.S. initial jobless claims fell to about 215,000 last week

On October 17, according to data analytics on unquarterly state-level claims released during the U.S. government shutdown, the number of initial jobless claims in the United States fell last week. According to an analysis of the data by Bloomberg, the number of initial claims in the week ended October 11 was about 215,000, lower than the previous week's estimate of 234,000. Due to the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Labor has not released weekly unemployment reports since September 25, but still provides downloadable data for most states. This estimate is revised from the original data source using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' pre-published weekly seasonal adjustment factor. This method is highly consistent with official quarterly data when data is available for all states. However, the latest weekly figures for Arizona, Massachusetts, Nevada and Tennessee were missing and replaced with an average of the previous four weeks. Calculations showed that the number of renewals rose slightly to 1.93 million in the week ending Oct. 4, up from the previous week's estimate of 1.92 million.