U.S. Unemployment Claims Decline Amid Government Shutdown

According to BlockBeats, the number of initial unemployment claims in the United States decreased last week during the government shutdown. Analysis by Bloomberg indicates that for the week ending October 11, approximately 215,000 claims were filed, down from the previous week's estimate of 234,000. Despite the shutdown, the U.S. Department of Labor has not released weekly unemployment reports since September 25 but has provided downloadable data for most states. The estimates were adjusted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' pre-published weekly seasonal adjustment factors, aligning closely with official data when all state data is complete. However, recent weekly data for Arizona, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Tennessee were missing and replaced with the average of the previous four weeks. Calculations show that for the week ending October 4, continuing claims slightly increased to 1.93 million, up from the previous week's estimate of 1.92 million.