US Unemployment Falls to 9.4%?

Away from computer this morning, but a good jobs report today for the US. The unemployment rate is down (due largely to discouraged workers) and the rate of job losses slowed considerably and beat expectations by a good margin. This stongly suggests that the sitmulus plan is gaining some traction.

UPDATE: Remember when the same thing happened to Oregon's Unemployment rate? From March to April of this year the unemployment rate fell 0.1 percentage point. Lots of discouraged workers but it did not mean a reversal of the trend of increasing unemployment rates. As long as we are still shedding jobs we will see unemployment grow. It takes over 100,000 new jobs a month to keep up with the growing potential work force.

But as unemployment is probably going to be one of the last things to turn around, this, along with little bits of good news from other parts of the economy (credit markets, for example) is a reassuring sign that things are slowly turning around.