by Calculated Risk on 12/25/2011 09:31:00 AM

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all!

• A better job market would be a great present for 2012. Although hiring will probably remain sluggish, there is a little good news ... from Greg Robb at MarketWatch: Jobless Claims becoming tought to ignore

While it is a bit of a stretch to say that economists are snug in their beds with visions of jobless claims dancing in their heads, there is no denying that they are growing more excited about the improvement in claims over the past month and will be focusing on that release in the holiday-shortened week.

“People are going to be focusing pretty heavily on claims,” said Josh Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at MFR Inc.

Claims have fallen by 40,000 over the past four weeks to a post-recession low of 364,000. After initial doubts when the decline started, many analysts are putting more weight on the down trend.

• And a little gift ... a common question, using excel, is how do you get from this:
to this:Here is a simple step-by-step example of one way to do it: How do you put recession bars on graphs using Excel (I use Excel 2010; but this works for 2007).

Yesterday:
• Schedule for Week of Dec 25th
• Summary for Week ending Dec 23rd

Thanks to all. Happy Holidays!