Plus one: Louisiana gained one new active oil and gas rig this week, according to the weekly count from Houston-based oilfield services company Baker Hughes. The state’s total tally of active rigs is now at 51, up from 50 last week. Around this time last year, there were 54 active rigs exploring for oil and gas in Louisiana. Nationally, the number of active rigs exploring for oil and natural gas in the U.S. declined by six this week to 659 from 665 last week. There were 650 rigs one year ago. As The Associated Press notes, depressed energy prices have curtailed exploration throughout the country, although the rig count has been rebounding in recent months. The U.S. rig count peaked at 4,530 in 1981 and bottomed out in May at 404.
Back up: Now that the holidays are over, initial unemployment insurance claims in Louisiana are up. According to the latest data from the Louisiana Workforce Commission, initial unemployment claims for the week ending Jan. 7 increased to 2,708 from the previous week’s total of 1,851. For the comparable week a year ago, 4,203 initial claims were filed. The four-week moving average, a less volatile measure of claims, decreased to 2,322 from the previous week’s average of 2,361. Continued unemployment insurance weeks claimed for the week ending Jan. 7 increased to 23,574 from the previous week’s total of 23,434. Continued weeks claimed were above the comparable figure of 23,331 for the week ending Jan. 9, 2016.
Good outlook: Executives of big U.S. banks expressed optimism today about the outlook for 2017 in their first public comments about quarterly earnings since the U.S. presidential election in November. As Reuters reports, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Bank of America Corp., the two largest U.S. banks, kicked off the corporate reporting season on a rosy note, each with healthy increases in fourth-quarter profit. Those improvements came on the back of trading revenue gains, higher interest rates, healthy loan growth and cost controls. On the flip side, the earnings of Wells Fargo & Co., which also reported today, were hurt by the fallout of a sales scandal and a loss related to accounting, both of which are particular to the San Francisco-based lender. On conference calls with reporters and analysts, top executives were sanguine about topics ranging from interest rates and loan growth, to regulation and the incoming administration of President-Elect Donald Trump. Reuters has the full story.
