New Home Sales Dip, Jobless Claims Spike Unexpectedly
A Commerce Department report released yesterday shows new home sales declining 0.2% last January and supply rising to the higest level since 2010. Still, the 481K units sold exceeded economists' predictions of a 470K adjusted annual rate and outperformed January 2014's result by 5.3%. One explanation for the dip involved the icy cold and neck-high snow pounding much of the Northeast, where new sales plummeted 51.6% to a record low.
In a bigger surprise, today the Department of Labor reported that jobless claims jumped by 31K—the biggest gain since 2013—from the previous week, to 313K. A Bloomberg survey had forecast a mere 8K-claim uptick. And the news clashes with a recent string of rosy labor market developments. But analysts often advise against putting too much stock in the weekly numbers, and the four-week moving average spiked a modest 11.5K jobless claims.
