US 2nd quarter GDP and US and German unemployment

The US Commerce Department updated its report on second quarter GDP yesterday. Reuters reports:

In a final estimate of second-quarter gross domestic product or GDP, the broadest measure of national economic performance, the Commerce Department left unchanged its estimate of growth that it published a month ago.

It said revisions upward in spending were offset by somewhat weaker exports of services and inventory-building than it previously thought, leaving second-quarter GDP growth at a 3.3 percent annual rate, slowing from 3.8 percent growth in the first quarter.

The report also mentions a fall in jobless claims.

New claims for jobless pay fell more than expected, by 79,000 last week to 356,000 as hurricane-related applications declined, the Labor Department said... The jobless claims data indicated healthy labor markets in areas outside of the Gulf Coast, analysts said.

The employment situation is worse in Germany.

Unemployment in Germany, Europe's largest economy, jumped in September as people who'd been removed from the Federal Labor Agency's register at the start of the year were reclassified as jobseekers.

The number of unemployed people, adjusted for seasonal swings, rose by 39,000 from August to 4.83 million, the Nuremberg- based agency said today. Economists expected a decline of 12,000, according to the median of 26 forecasts in a Bloomberg survey. Without the statistical effect September jobless fell 22,000.

"The underlying decline of 22,000 in seasonally-adjusted unemployment is 100 percent due to subsidized labor," said Holger Fahrinkrug, an economist at UBS AG in Frankfurt. "These are de- facto unemployed people who are no longer included in the statistic." The increase in oil costs may prompt companies to cut staff to restore profit margins, Fahrinkrug said.