Hike in state jobless rate

All right, so this gets a little confusing. The U.S. unemployment rate for February was unchanged at 9.7 percent, and the California unemployment rate for January was 12.5 percent, up from 12.3 percent in December - except that the 12.3 percent rate is revised downward from the original estimate of 12.4 percent. Got it? Normally, national and state numbers don't come out on the same day - and covering different months. But every year at this time the government goes through its benchmarking process, where the numbers from the previous year get smoothed over to account for various bits of information that wasn't available when the jobs data was first tabulated. That's a time-consuming process and delays the release of the January numbers. But hold on, I'm not finished. The government has a separately prepared payroll survey and that shows that in January 32,500 jobs were added in the state. In December, 41,200 jobs were lost, also a revision from an earlier number.

So what does it all mean? Mainly that the economy continues to be in a muddle - not quite a recession and not quite a recovery, at least a recovery that anyone would be able to notice. As we've seen with other economic indicators recently released, there are enough good-ish and bad-ish numbers to keep forecasters from all directions reasonably satisfied. The problem for the optimists is that they have only so much to cheer - companies are starting to hire here and there, but many of the new jobs are skilled manufacturing positions. That leaves out lots of people, especially the folks whose previous work is being phased out.

*On the radio: I was on KPCC's "Airtalk" this morning, talking about the economy with Larry Mantle and economist Chris Thornberg.