State Unemployment Insurance Claims Indicate Strong Recovery

"Conorsen" on Twitter gave the heads up on how to look at the weekly unemployment claims correctly, as he detrended the series with USA population growth.

Working on that line of logic, I detrended the weekly seasonally adjusted data by the Civilian Labor Pool growth since 1967.

A very interesting picture appears with the blue above being the detrended and green/olive as reported.

The detrended series puts the current data in historical context of the USA GDP - and clearly USA unemployment stress has clearly been repaired such that it is indicating a full and strong recovery is now taking place. In fact despite the current bathos - this has been a large but a typical economic recession in terms of the stress to the economy.

Another, perhaps rather crude, but effective way to illustrate the importance of the above is to scatter plot the inverse change in the above detrended UI weekly annual percentage change with the annual change in the SP500. This indicates that a 30% to 50% rally in the SP 500 is typical and can be supported by the substantial drop we have recently experienced in State UI claims reduction - especially if seen in a historical context (detrended).

Source of data is the amazing FRED from the St Louis Fed.