I am repeating an exercise I undertook in 2012 when Superstorm Sandy disrupted the initial claims data: estimating what the initial jobless claims would have been, but for the hurricanes.

In 2012 I created that adjustment by backing out the affected states (NY and NJ) from the non-seasonally adjusted data.  That gave me the number of initial claims filed in the other 48 states.  I compared that with the same metric one year earlier, and multiplied by the seasonal adjustment.

That gave me the number if the affected states had the same relative number of claims during the given week, as all of the unaffected states.  In 2012, it showed that Sandy was not masking any underlying weakness in the economy.

The state by state data is released with a one week delay.  So what follows is the analysis for the week of September 9, the number for which was reported one week ago and revised this week to 282,000. Last week I found the adjusted number for September 2 was 239,000.  Last week I only had to back out Texas, but this week I have also backed out Florida.

Here is the table for the Week of September 10 in 2016 vs. September 9 this year:

Metric                              2016                   2018

Not seasonally adjusted:  193,291             212,284 

Florida claims:                 7,493                 4,773 (!!! - yes, a decline this year)
Texas claims:                   13,432               52,024                

NSA claims ex-TX+FL    202,008             155,487

TX+FL as % of total:       10.8%                   n/a

2018 w/ TX+FL adjustment:  n/a              172,280

In both 2016 and 2018 the weekly seasonal adjustment was 1.33. Multiplying the non-seasonally adjusted total of 172,280, gives us the hurricane-adjusted initial jobless claims number for the week of September 9, 2018 of 229,000.