Best Job Report of the Recession, Unemployment Rate Falls
Today’s Labor Department jobs report contained the most encouraging news about the job market that our country has seen in quite awhile. The numbers are being hailed by some as a sure fire sign that the job market is finally headed in the right direction. The job market had been the last remaining sector left that had not shown any signs of improvement since the beginning of our current recession.
According to today’s report non-farm payroll jobs fell by just 11,000 for the month of November. That was a major improvement from the previous month when over 10 times that many job losses were reported. Those numbers also marked the smallest number of job losses since the recession begun in December of 2007. Every month since then the country has lost jobs and never as few as in this past month. This caused the unemployment rate to actually decline from 10.2% to 10.0%.
The Labor Department’s report was detailed in a very informative article on the Wall Street Journal’s website entitled “Unemployment Rate Falls to 10%”. It seems like the one anchor that was left keeping people from actually seeing the effects of the recession being over, might have finally rid itself of the grip of the depths.
The news of the report caught many economists by surprise as no one expected such an encouraging report to be released by the Labor Department today. I don’t want to sound to optimistic but we very well could see an actual job increase in the upcoming month.
The best news came from the service industry, which is also the largest provider of jobs in this country. Service jobs rose by 58,000 in the month of November. These numbers though were offset by the losses of both construction (27,000) and manufacturing (41,000).
While these numbers are the best we’ve seen in quite sometime and can be determined to be nothing but good news, its important to remember that there is quite a long way to go. When you’ve fallen so much it eventually reaches a point where there is nowhere to go but up. Hopefully the job market in this country has finally reached its bottom and from here there is only one direction we can go. Mind you one good month does not constitute a trend, but all trends have to start somewhere.
President Obama spoke earlier this morning, after the release of the jobs report, in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania and expressed extreme optimism about the these figures. The president opened by saying “I want to do something I haven’t had a chance to do that often during my first year in office, and that is to share some modestly encouraging news on our economy,”. Some members of the press did note that in the official remarks released to them before the speech, the word modestly had been omitted. This shows me that while President Obama would like to project an optimistic strong front, he still remains cautious as should you and I. The president did later remark “This is good news, just in time for the season of hope.”, while also asking people to bear in the mind that “we still have a long way to go”.
I think President Obama’s attitude pretty much sums up this numbers very accurately. Its certainly good news and can not be skewed any other way, but its important to remain cautious. No one wants to get their hopes up only to have them come crashing back down. However, it must be noted that the job market was really the only sector of our economy that had yet to show signs of improvement. Economists and Fed Chief Bernanke have come out and declared the recession over for quite some time, but the general populace just could not buy it while so many people remained unemployed and unable to find work. If these numbers can really hold up then the average Joe might finally start to feel the effects of this recession being over. That’s something that I’m hoping for, the American people are hoping for, and our President is hoping for.
