Won't first time unemployment claims drop after a long recession?

[Madison320]

I heard that unemployment claims dropped to the lowest level since 2007 or something. This seems like a bogus statistic to me. Don't you start running out of first time unemployment claims after a long period of high unemployment? How often can you claim unemployment? If you had 100% unemployment, and everyone filed a claim, you'd have a huge unemployment claim number followed by zero unemployment claims, right? So you can have nobody filing unemployment claims with 100% unemployment! If there was an outbreak of some fatal disease, and almost everyone died, would it be good news because there's almost no new people getting the disease, cause they're all already dead?

[Zippyjuan]

As a trend, it means fewer people losing their jobs than before but as a statistic, you are right- by itself it does not tell the whole story. One also needs to know how many people got hired as well.

[oyarde]

I heard that unemployment claims dropped to the lowest level since 2007 or something. This seems like a bogus statistic to me. Don't you start running out of first time unemployment claims after a long period of high unemployment? How often can you claim unemployment? If you had 100% unemployment, and everyone filed a claim, you'd have a huge unemployment claim number followed by zero unemployment claims, right? So you can have nobody filing unemployment claims with 100% unemployment! If there was an outbreak of some fatal disease, and almost everyone died, would it be good news because there's almost no new people getting the disease, cause they're all already dead?

It means 900k every three weeks instead of 1 million ea three weeks filing for unemployment , for the past 7 yrs or so .So , yeah , it is very , very $#@!ty .