Initial Claims

Jobs are fundamental to both the stock market and GDP. If you don’t have jobs, you don’t have companies with stocks to trade. If you don’t have jobs, you aren’t producing any stuff that gets measured by GDP. Really, what’s the point of all this stuff we are measuring if nobody is working?

When everyone who wants a job has a job, we say times are good. So, if people are losing jobs and filing for unemployment, that’s a sign that things are not so good. Fortunately, this is tracked on a weekly basis:

The change-based charts for this metric are also extremely informative:

Please note that charts need a moment to load as there is a significant amount of data processing.