US Unemployment Drops to 9.7%

Glenn Reynolds calls it an economic miracle; "Economy Sheds 20,000 Jobs But Unemployment Rate Drops to 9.7 Percent.

Okay, not so much of a miracle: “A sharp increase in the number of people giving up looking for work helped to depress the jobless rate. The number of ‘discouraged job seekers’ rose to 1.1 million in January from 734,000 a year ago.”"

As he explains, and as I have gone into in numerous past posts, the drop has more to do with the way in which we count the unemployed then an increase in people working. Indeed we actually lost jobs, yet the unemployment dropped .3%.

Jim Geraghty explains it as 'discouraging our way out of this recession'.

Video embedded below.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100205/ap_on_bi_go_ec_fi/us_economy

"The outlook for jobs became a bit less bleak Friday when the government released January's unemployment rate showing an unexpected decline from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. It was the first drop in seven months.

Still, the government now estimates 8.4 million jobs vanished in the Great Recession. And economists say the nation will be lucky to get back 1.5 million of them this year. They also warn it will take until the middle of the decade for the job market to return to normal."

To put this in the contexts of the last few months; after rising to %9.5, 'fake' falling to %9.4, rising to %9.7, and then rising again to 9.8%, and rising again to 10.2%, dropping to 10%, holding steady, and then dropping to 9.7%.