Assessing The Unemployment Numbers

Really thorough and insightful analysis from Daniel Indiviglio:

Even though December's national unemployment rate was unchanged, I found this report to be surprisingly negative. I would have thought that December would be a very slow month for layoffs, given the holidays. But the economy still lost 85,000 more workers in December, reversing direction from November's gain of 4,000 jobs. And the soaring number of discouraged workers is also quite bad news. You won't be able to have a legitimate decline in unemployed Americans until that number comes way down. Of course, for that to happen, the national unemployment rate will first have to go up, with those Americans re-entering the workforce.