Jobless Claims Down; Manufacturing Productivity And Orders Up

Feb. 3, 2005
The bottom line on Feb. 3's federal economic data dump: Good for manufacturing. Initial claims for unemployment insurance edged downward last week, falling by 9,000 to 316,000, the U.S. Labor Department reported on Feb. 3. The department's four-week ...

The bottom line on Feb. 3's federal economic data dump: Good for manufacturing.

Initial claims for unemployment insurance edged downward last week, falling by 9,000 to 316,000, the U.S. Labor Department reported on Feb. 3. The department's four-week moving average of initial claims, which smoothes out week-to-week swings in the data, fell by 10,250 to 331,500.

U.S. manufacturing productivity advanced at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.6% during the final quarter of 2004 and grew 4.9% for all of last year, the Labor Department also reported on Feb. 3. In productivity growth, manufacturing well outpaced the overall nonfarm business sector of the U.S. economy in both the fourth quarter of 2004 and for the full year. Productivity grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of just 0.8% in the nonfarm business sector during the fourth quarter; for the full year, productivity growth in the sector was 4.1%.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Commerce Department reported that new orders for manufactured goods in December rose three-tenths of a percentage point, or $1 billion, to $379.1 billion. For all of 2004, new orders for manufactured durable and nondurable goods were up 11.1% from their 2003 level.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

 John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
      
      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
      
      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
      
      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
      
      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
      
      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
      

 

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