Friday, February 5, 2010

US Unemployment Falls to 9.7%

And this is not good news. Once again we are still losing jobs, 20,000, when the expectation was that we would finally be adding them. So the downturn in the unemployment rate is a supply side response - those who stopped actively looking for work.

There are some good signs, manufacturing added 11,000 jobs and (as The New York Times reports) temporary workers and hours worked increased. SO there are continually improving metrics but not the one that matters most. We need to start seeing net job creation and it need to get robust.

So still we wait.

1 comment:

Diogenes said...

I don't understand how the government can simultaneously claim that unemployment is down while the figures show that there are actually fewer jobs than the month before. If the government was a patient, a psychologist would diagnose it as suffering from a mental disease called Cognitive Dissonance.