In the roller coaster ride that’s the initial unemployment claims in the U.S., the Labor Department saw a decrease of 16,000 claims last week. That’s coming off of last week’s report that had an increase of 16,000 initial claims.

While the number of initial claims keeps jumping up and down, the result has been stagnation in claims around the 450,000 to 460,000 range. The drop to 453,000 this week beat expectations as economists expected claims to fall by 5,000, according to the Wall Street Journal. A less volatile measure of the number of unemployment claims, the four-week moving average also fell by more than 6,000 to 458,000.

Continuing jobless claims, or those who continue to collect unemployment after the initial claim, dropped by 83,000 to 4,457,000 for the week ending September 18, 2010.

“Employers are still kind of cautious,” said senior economist at Ameriprise Financial Inc. Russell Price to Bloomberg. “We need to regain that broader momentum in the economy, and something like that is just slow to develop.”