On the way in to work today the news was all about the pending unemployment report and how it will be bad. It wasn’t bad – the nation’s job losses leveled off  between June and July:

Employers throttled back on layoffs in July, cutting just 247,000 jobs, the fewest in a year, and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.4 percent. It was a better than expected showing that offered a strong signal that the recession is finally ending.”

The question is whether this is just a summer time blip or has the recession and job losses really began to level off? If there is a leveling off, then all the dire predictions of growing unemployment through out the rest of the year will have been proven to be too pessimistic. 

However, I do not think this was the case. President Obama’s team has been a leading voice in these concerns, setting expectations for months of bad news. I doubt they would do that if there was even a ray of hope they could be touting a turn around in the jobs picture.

I guess we have another month to wait and see. When I have the time I will try and see what the broader under employment statistics show. We could be seeing a lot of people moving to lower paying and temporary jobs, not getting back into full paying careers.

Update: I checked the U-6 number for the broader under employed metric and it dropped from 16.5% in June to 16.3% in July. With that said, I caution everyone to understand these unemployment surveys are just like polls, they have margins of error. I seriously doubt they are at the .1% level.

Tags: Unemployment Rates