"Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims decline to 352,000"

Via Calculated Risk, some decent news on the jobs front:

Weekly Initial Unemployment Claims decline to 352,000, by Calculated Risk: The DOL reports:

In the week ending January 14, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 352,000, a decrease of 50,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 402,000. The 4-week moving average was 379,000, a decrease of 3,500 from the previous week's revised average of 382,500.

The previous week was revised up to 402,000 from 399,000.

The following graph shows the 4-week moving average of weekly claims since January 2000.

Click on graph for larger image.

The dashed line on the graph is the current 4-week average. The four-week average of weekly unemployment claims decreased this week to 379,000.

The 4-week moving average is well below 400,000. ... This is the lowest level for weekly claims since April 2008.

Things are looking better, but I am not ready to conclude we are in the clear just yet -- there are still risks ahead and, in any case, we need an acceleration of activity in order to recover in a decent period of time. Unfortunately, it's not clear where that acceleration will come from. I hope the good news continues, and that it gets even better, but policymakers need to remain wary and, importantly, they should not conclude that the economy is healthy enough to begin raising interest rates or pursuing aggressive deficit reduction -- it's still far too early in the recovery process for that.