New UI claims crept up in early January
Note: Thanks to my new subscribers (my minimum wage article brought in a lot of traffic)! I publish this newsletter twice a week. Tuesdays are regular updates about the Inland Empire economy; Fridays are “special topics” posts related to policies, real estate, higher education, or anything else that might impact the region. Feel free to email me at daniel.p.macdonald85@gmail.com with any requests or questions.
For the past 2-3 weeks, national new unemployment insurance (“UI”) claims have been making headlines as they slowly creep back up from their late-2021 lows. The backdrop of this story is, of course, Omicron, and so I checked back in to see how these statistics are like for the Inland Empire.
On January 4, I downplayed the potential impact of Omicron, citing stable unemployment insurance claims statistics for San Bernardino and Riverside Counties and no major surprises from other regional or statewide data. From a public health standpoint, things have certainly worsened since that post (just 2 and a half weeks ago), and it appears that the economy has slipped slightly as well.
I looked back at the data and there has been upward movement in new UI claims regionally. For the week ending on January 15, new claims were at 3,429 in San Bernardino County, resulting in a 4-week average of 3,005 compared to a previous 4-week average of 2,904 (a 3.5% increase). Similarly, in Riverside County, the 4-week average increased from 3,054 to 3,211 (a 5.1% increase).
While these numbers are still historically low, their movement is different from what we were seeing a year ago, when the labor market was much more clearly on the path of improvement. On the bright side, these are not major upswings, so I am still cautiously optimistic that February, and possibly even late-January, will be better.
While it’s too late for a full post on this, the metro-area establishment survey results were just released this morning and show a bit of a slowdown as well - although the seasonally adjusted metro area results from Beacon Economics still show positive growth from November to December. I’ll have more to say about that later this week, but statistics definitely suggest a slowdown.