Unemployment 8.6%

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I certainly am hoping that this bodes better times.  But, for the moment, the lower unemployment number looks like a pretty mixed bag,  Along with hirings in the past month, the previous two months' hiring figures were revised upward, so this means, as far as good news goes, that hiring in the last quarter has been consistently better than earlier in the year.  And I suppose some will take it as a marginally good sign that private employers are hiring while governments are laying off workers.  But many of the newest jobs could be transient holiday ones, since the biggest gains were among retailers, and this may especially be the case without continued growth and if the European crisis gets out of hand.  The worst thing of all about the lower unemployment number is the degree to which it's a mathematical result of 315,000 people dropping out of the labor force because of long-term unemployment, so the lower number doesn't really represent strong and significant gains in the labor market overall.