The bad news in jobless claims came in the new seasonal adjustment, take this news as you like.

The Department of Labor reported some pessimistic news on the jobs outlook Thursday morning.

Sure, there was the 14,000 increase in initial jobless claims, and maybe that’s bad news — it could well suggest that perhaps the strong early start to the year has faded, as was the case for the two years prior — but it could well just be some holiday-related distortion. It’s too early to tell.

No, the unequivocal bad news came in the seasonal adjustment changes. To step back for a second, statisticians seasonally adjust data so they can better understand the trend. Of course, more houses are sold in the summer and more toys are sold in December so without seasonal adjustment the data would look so volatile as to be nearly useless.

But seasonal adjustment is as much an art as a science and on Thursday the DOL economists refined their seasonal factors.
Ian Shepherdson of  Pantheon Macroeconomic Advisors explains the bad news:
“On average, claims for each week of  this year have been revised up by 3K, with the biggest revisions coming in January, where the two sub-340K readings — we were  always suspicious of them — have been moved up by 15K and 13K  respectively. The underlying trend in claims is still falling,  but we expect the downtrend will stall or even reverse for a time in Q2/3 as the sequestration causes jobs to be lost. The labor  market has improved, but it is a long way from normal.”

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/03/28/the-bad-news-in-jobless-claims-came-in-the-new-seasonal-adjustment/