If It's Thursday...

New jobless claims up 12k to 472k.  Not good.  We badly need to get under 400k on a weekly basis.

Continuing claims up 88k to 4.57 million.  Still very high 30 months into this recession.

Oh, and for the inflation/deficit hawks:

The Labor Department says the Consumer Price Index, the government's most closely watched inflation barometer, dropped 0.2 percent in May, following a 0.1 percent dip in April.

So-called "core" prices, which strip out energy and food, edged up 0.1 percent in May, after a flat reading the month before. 

Prices have been deflating for months now.   The only reason we're not seeing much worse deflation is because of the stimulus.  The CPI was down for the first time in five decades in 2009.  It will get worse this year.  Inflation is not the problem in this recession.  It never was.