The Unemployment Rate: A Miracle?

This morning, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released the monthly unemployment numbers. This time, the amount of "net" job losses for the month of July was only 247,000 workers. This was significantly better than the 325,000 to 370,000 lost jobs that were expected (Click to See Briefing.com's Statistical Summary). While a single month doesn't make a trend, the fact is that we have been seeing a dramatic slowdown in job losses since once hitting a one-month loss of around 741,000 in January of this year (Click to See Full Story from Marketwatch.com).

What is almost a miracle about this jobs report is how you can lose another 247,000 jobs in the workforce (additive to the all the prior jobs losses) and, yet, the unemployment rate goes lower; from 9.5% to 9.4%. It's like me saying that I put another couple of thousand miles on my car yet, my odometer reading actually went down. But, of course, this is probably accurate for government work!