Take this with a certain grain of salt, as these numbers bounce around quite a bit. But the weekly read on US initial claims for unemployment insurance fell to a four-year low Oct. 11, reinforcing the US as perhaps the only major bright spot in the global economy at the moment. Claims fell to 339,000, a drop of 30,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 369,000. Seasonal adjustment issues and the fact that one state accounted for a significant part of the drop in requests for unemployment insurance are giving some analysts pause about getting too giddy. Still,the trend is clearly towards lower claims, a positive sign for the US labor market.