Set for Life with an Unemployment Check, a Can of Natural Ice and a Phillies Blunt Cigar

Chillin with My Check

It seems 424K Americans are heading into Memorial Day weekend with at least some cash in their pockets. Perhaps it’s just enough for the casino bus to Atlantic City, where they hope they might turn a government handout into a jackpot to set them up for life.

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Set for Life with an Unemployment Check, a Can of Natural Ice and a Phillies Blunt Cigar

The Department of Labor reported Weekly Initial Jobless Claims rose again last week, to 424K; that’s 10K more than the prior week’s revised count. It’s not a good sign after plenty other bad signs throughout the month of May, a dark period that saw tornadoes run wild and unemployment insurance claims re-establish themselves above the 400K mark. The four-week moving average can attest to that, sitting now at 438,500.

I suppose the lull in hiring, which we assume paralleled the increase in jobless claims, was the result of damaged consumer confidence and its result, lighter consumer spending. This article is being published ahead of the government’s Personal Income & Outlays data, due out Friday morning. We’ll receive some sort of color on consumer spending with that release. Though the report will cover April, while these weekly jobless claims announcements reach the wire fresh. Even so, economists surveyed by Bloomberg are looking for the pace of spending to slow to +0.4%, versus the 0.6% pace set in March. What is supposed to accelerate is the Fed’s favorite inflation gauge, the Core PCE Price Index, which is seen rising 0.2%, against the 0.1% increase in March.

Cue Snoop Dog CD here...

It was rising prices this past month that stalled consumers, especially gasoline, which touched $4 a gallon. That’s high enough to keep Americans planted in their backyards with a can of Natural Ice. That’s the cheap beer of the day; you old timers can liken to Milwaukee’s Best, or The Beast, as it’s known among serious beer connoisseurs. You can grab a six pack of Natural Ice for less than $5, and it goes well enough with a Phillies Blunt cigar, the poor man’s Partagas. Heck, sitting on a stoop with the two of those and the gang, listening to a baseball game on a sultry summer night, well it just doesn’t get much better… You can keep your stuffy Midtown bar and your vain, superficial, ravenous foreign lady. I’ll take my American girl and my American game.

Supposedly, insured unemployment fell by a tenth of a point, to 2.9% in the lagged May 14 period. In case you were counting reality, the number of Americans collecting on some sort of UI program numbered 7,739,572 in the May 7 period, which is quite a bit more than 2.9%. And that don’t include the poor saps who have given up, and the poorer of spirit saps who are swallowing their pride waiting tables or writing to the ether-world. Though, at least the poor saps have time to spend with The Beast.

We always like to give you the skinny on regional unemployment so here it is:

The highest insured unemployment rates in the week ending May 7 were in Alaska (5.5 percent), Puerto Rico (4.3), Oregon (4.2), Pennsylvania (4.0), California (3.9), Nevada (3.7), New Jersey (3.7), Connecticut (3.6), Illinois (3.6), Idaho (3.4), Rhode Island (3.4), and Wisconsin (3.4).

The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending May 14 were in Florida (+1,340), Georgia (+747), New Mexico (+415), Idaho (+282), and Hawaii (+236), while the largest decreases were in California (-6,828), Michigan (-6,740), New York (-2,569), Alabama (-2,093) and Wisconsin (-2,079).



Article should interest investors in Paychex (Nasdaq: PAYX), Manpower (NYSE: MAN), Robert Half International (NYSE: RHI), 51Job Inc. (Nasdaq: JOBS), Monster World Wide (NYSE: MWW), Korn/Ferry International (NYSE: KFY), Administaff (NYSE: ASF), Kforce (Nasdaq: KFRC), TrueBlue (NYSE: TBI), Dice Holdings (NYSE: DHX), Kelly Services (Nasdaq: KELYA), SFN Group (NYSE: SFN), CDI Corp. (NYSE: CDI), Cross Country Healthcare (Nasdaq: CCRN), On Assignment (Nasdaq: ASGN), Molson Coors (NYSE: TAP), Boston Beer (NYSE: SAM), Anheuser-Busch InBev (NYSE: BUD), AMN Healthcare Services (NYSE: AHS), Barrett Business Services (Nasdaq: BBSI), Hudson Highland Group (Nasdaq: HHGP), StarTek (NYSE: SRT), RCM Technologies (Nasdaq: RCMT), VirtualScopics (Nasdaq: VSCP), American Surgical (OTC: ASRG.OB), Medical Connections (OTC: MCTH.OB), iGen Networks (OTC: IGEN.OB), St. Joseph (OTC: STJO.OB), General Employment Enterprises (NYSE: JOB), Total Neutraceutical (OTC: TNUS.OB), TeamStaff (Nasdaq: TSTF), Stratum (OTC: STTH.OB), Purespectrum (OTC: PSRU.OB), Corporate Resource Services (OTC: CRRS.OB), Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), J.P. Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Citigroup (NYSE: C), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), TD Bank (NYSE: TD), PNC Bank (NYSE: PNC), General Electric (NYSE: GE), Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), McDonald's (NYSE: MCD), Alcoa (NYSE: AA), American Express (NYSE: AXP), Boeing (NYSE: BA), Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO), Chevron (NYSE: CVX), DuPont (NYSE: DD), Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS), Home Depot (NYSE: HD), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Kraft (NYSE: KFT), Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO), 3M (NYSE: MMM), Merck (NYSE: MRK), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG), AT&T (NYSE: T), Travelers (NYSE: TRV), United Technologies (NYSE: UTX), Verizon (NYSE: VZ), Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM), Philip Morris (NYSE: PM), Acuity (NYSE: AYI).

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