First time claims for unemployment compensation continued their string of record lows for the same week of the year. The actual number, not subject to any seasonal hocus pocus was 220,000 (rounded).

That was just 1,548 claims per million employed workers last week. That compares with 1,817 per million in the same week of 2007 just as the housing bubble was beginning to implode and 1,914 in that week of 1999 as the Internet Bubble was driving toward its orgiastic climax. In stock market terms we think of moves like this as “blowoffs.” They are the final heartbeats of a bubble before its last heartbeat and rigor mortis setting in.

Previous record low strings in initial claims were always associated with bubble peaks and peak economic activity resulting from those bubbles. Many bullish pundits have claimed that the behavior of the markets over the past several years was not a bubble because public participation was limited. However, historically not all bubbles have involved Joe and Jane Sixpack. Some bubbles have been limited to institutional manias. The Nifty Fifty bubble of the late 1960s and early 1970s is more analogous to today, than the more recent example of the housing bubble.

The stock market has recently had a break. Historically, employers usually seem to be the last to get the news when bubbles start to deflate. They move in herds too.  The very fact of employers’ record long term ebullience should be warning enough, as chronicled here in these reports over the past year. Employers still haven’t wisened up. They are still in an employee hoarding bubble that has yet to burst. The real job cuts are still to come.

The Department of Labor (DoL) reports the unmanipulated numbers that state unemployment offices actually count and report each week. This week it said, “The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 219,591 in the week ending September 19, an increase of 20,625 (or 10.4 percent) from the previous week. The seasonal factors had expected an increase of 18,232 (or 9.2 percent) from the previous week. There were 239,780 initial claims in the comparable week in 2014.”