Finally, some decent news on jobs
The unemployment rate did something last month that it hasn’t done since December 2007: it went down. The new rate of 10.0 is still too high, but it beat analysts’ expectations (they had expected the rate to stay the same.) And employers shed 11,000 jobs — the smallest number in a very long time, and a fraction of economists’ estimates, which had predicted 125,000 jobs lost. More detail from the Department of Labor:
Among the major worker groups, unemployment rates for adult men (10.5 percent), adult women (7.9 percent), teenagers (26.7 percent), whites (9.3 percent), blacks (15.6 percent), and Hispanics (12.7 percent) showed little change in November. The unemployment rate for Asians was 7.3 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs fell by 463,000 in November. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by 2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent. (See tables A-8 and A-9.)
The president’s much-maligned jobs summit turns out to have been pretty darned well timed. And while apparently economists and analysts have no idea what the economy is up to, based on their predictions, the expectation is that jobs will begin to grow by spring. Here’s hoping.
Related: where the jobs are.
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