It’s too soon to declare that the worst of the recession has passed, but it’s also premature to dismiss the idea. We are, in short, in a never-never land of waiting and watching, and this game may roll on for many a moon.
To help pass the time, we’re watching the data as it comes in, including initial jobless claims. As we’ve written, this is one of several metrics that may offer clues about when the business cycle reaches a trough. Like any one statistic, it can’t be fully trusted, and so we must look to a range of data points. But history suggests that as single measures of broad economic trends go, this one’s unusually useful in trying to peer into the future, or so it’s been in the past.