Initial Jobless Claims in the US Climb More Than Forecast - Bloomberg

A job seeker looks over federal government job titles during Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton's job opportunity fair at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University, and Marvin Goodfriend, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, discuss Federal Reserve policy and the economy. They talk with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Televisions "Surveillance Midday." (Source: Bloomberg)

More Americans than forecast filed applications for unemployment benefits last week, showing the labor market will take time to improve.

Jobless claims rose by 20,000 to 457,000 in the week ended Oct. 30 from a revised 437,000 the prior week, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The total number of people receiving unemployment insurance fell, while those on extended payments increased.

The pace of firings has held within a narrow range in 2010, showing employers continue to focus on cutting costs more than a year into the economic recovery. Calling progress toward lower joblessness and faster growth “disappointingly slow,” Federal Reserve policy makers yesterday announced plans to bolster the recovery through another round of large-scale asset purchases.

Claims have “been relatively steady, consistent with lackluster to moderate labor market conditions,” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James & Associates Inc. in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Another Labor Department report showed worker productivity rose more than forecast in the third quarter as companies redoubled efforts to rein in costs amid signs the recovery was cooling.

A measure of employee output per hour increased at a 1.9 percent annual rate after falling 1.8 percent in the previous three months. Labor costs adjusted for efficiency gains unexpectedly dropped at a 0.1 percent pace.

Stock-index futures and Treasuries held earlier gains after the reports. The December contract on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 0.9 percent to 1,208.3 at 8:57 a.m. in New York. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves inversely to price, fell to 2.50 percent from 2.57 percent late yesterday.

Exceeds Median Forecast

Economists forecast claims would rise to 442,000 from a previously estimated 434,000 the prior week, according to the median of 50 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Estimates ranged from 430,000 to 455,000.

The figures precede tomorrow’s Labor Department report on October employment. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg project companies added 80,000 positions. The unemployment rate was probably 9.6 percent for a third month, according to the survey.

The four-week moving average for claims, a less volatile measure, rose to 456,000 last week from 454,000.

The number of people continuing to receive jobless benefits dropped by 42,000 in the week ended Oct. 23 to 4.34 million.

Extended Benefits

The continuing claims figure does not include the number of Americans receiving extended and emergency benefits under federal programs. Those who’ve used up their traditional benefits and are now collecting emergency and extended payments increased by about 357,700 to 5.01 million in the week ended Oct. 16.

The unemployment rate among people eligible for benefits fell to 3.4 percent in the week ended Oct. 23 from 3.5 percent.

The labor market and the economy were top concerns for voters heading into the Nov. 2 congressional elections in which Republicans gained control of the U.S. House and narrowed the Democratic majority in the Senate.

To spur the economy and encourage job creation, the Fed yesterday said it will purchase an additional $600 billion in Treasury securities by the end of June. The Fed will buy about $75 billion a month and “will adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability,” the Fed’s Open Market Committee said in a statement in Washington.

Fed on Jobs

“Currently, the unemployment rate is elevated, and measures of underlying inflation are somewhat low,” the FOMC said. Progress in reaching its dual mandate of stable prices and low unemployment “has been disappointingly slow,” it said.

Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. is cutting more than 450 jobs in its selling, general and administrative areas this year and expects to make more reductions over the next two years, Chief Operating Officer Steven Klinger said on a conference call Nov. 1. The second-largest U.S. maker of corrugated packaging emerged from bankruptcy protection in June.

Some companies plan to expand. Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Rockwell Collins Inc., a maker of cockpit instruments and radios, last week said it’ll add 800 people, boosting staff by 4 percent during the next 12 months. Ford Motor Co., the second- largest U.S. automaker, said it will spend $850 million and add 1,200 jobs in Michigan by 2013 as sales rebound.

To contact the reporters on this story: Courtney Schlisserman in Washington at cschlisserma@bloomberg.net; Bob Willis in Washington at Bobwillis@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Christopher Wellisz at cwellisz@bloomberg.net

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FiveThirtyEight: Governors' Forecast Moves Toward Democrats in 3 Blue States - New York Times

Democrats have made progress in several states in our latest gubernatorial forecast. Although it remains very probable that Republicans will control the majority of the nation’s governorships after Nov. 2, it is now more likely that Democratic and independent candidates can hold Republicans to victories in 20 to 23 of the 37 contests that will be held on Election Day.

Most of the Democrats’ gains in the new forecast come in blue states. In Maryland, the race appears to have shifted sharply for the Democratic incumbent, Martin O’Malley, who holds double-digit leads over Robert Ehrlich, a former governor, in three new surveys. Mr. O’Malley also has at least 52 percent of the vote in each of the surveys, and Mr. Ehrlich’s winning chances have dropped to just 4 percent from 19 percent, according to the model.

In Hawaii, a state that had shown some surprisingly close polling, a survey for the Honolulu Advertiser gives Democrat Neil Abercrombie an 8-point lead over the Republican Duke Aiona; three surveys conducted earlier this month had shown a lead for Mr. Abercrombie of just 2 to 3 points. Hawaii is a tricky state to poll, and some of the work there has been odd this year — for instance, a Rasmussen poll that gave longtime incumbent Daniel Inouye just a 13-point lead against a complete unknown in the Senate race there. I’m not going to pretend to know exactly how to untangle everything, but the model now has Mr. Abercrombie as an 85 percent favorite, up from 79 percent.

Although I’m not inclined to talk about momentum, it may be an apt term in California, where Jerry Brown has improved his position over Meg Whitman for seven consecutive forecasts, and is now about 90 percent likely to win, according to the model, his chances having been as low as 36 percent in mid-September. The newest survey in the state, from The Los Angeles Times and the University of Southern California, may be a modest outlier in showing Mr. Brown with a 13-point lead — and, in a reversal of the pattern observed for Democrats throughout most of the country, performing better among likely voters than registered ones. Still, the fact is that essentially all of the recent surveys show bad news for Ms. Whitman, and she is now something of a long-shot.

We also show Democrats’ odds improving slightly in two purple states. The first is Ohio, where there’s been an odd dichotomy between surveys that show an essentially tied race and those that show a fairly clear lead for the Republican, John Kasich. The most recent poll, from the University of Cincinnati, is of the former type, giving Mr. Kasich a 2-point lead over the Democratic incumbent, Ted Strickland. The model has Mr. Strickland’s chances improving to about 20 percent from 15 percent; I’d feel a little better about them if there were more undecideds in the state (there are very few, although that’s accounted for by our forecast), or if Democrats were doing a better job of holding their own in the Senate race, which they appear bound to lose by a 15 or 20 point margin.

Florida, where the race has been nearly tied all year, remains that way, although this time the model makes Alex Sink, the Democrat, a nominal, 52-percent favorite, as a new Zogby poll shows her ahead of Rick Scott by 4 points. The race has been so tight in Florida that the lead in our forecast has been shifting back and forth in picking a leader with seemingly every new survey release.

One state shows a shift toward Republicans with this update. It is South Carolina, where an InsiderAdvnatage poll gives Republican Nikki Haley a 14-point lead, contradicting some other recent surveys that had suggested her race against Vincent Sheheen had tightened.

One last wild card for the true die-hards in the audience: it is a Nielson Brothers poll in South Dakota which shows Democrat Scott Heidepriem just 3 points behind his opponent Dennis Daugaard, who had been thought to be heavily favored. There was also a Rasmussen Reports poll out in the state this week that gave Mr. Daugaard a 19-point lead. Our model has certain failsafes under which it treats a poll as basically being an outlier, and those were triggered in the case of the Nielson Brothers poll, and so it therefore still shows Mr. Daugaard as having a fairly unambiguous advantage. Still, the state probably deserves another poll, particularly since the U.S. House race there is extremely competitive.

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