U.S. Jobs Data Shows Vast Improvement

U.S. jobs data has come in today, with a rather surprising drop in unemployment. While in May there were still 345.000 jobs lost, the numbers pale in comparison to what has been happening since the recession. The Financial Times reports on the latest U.S. jobs numbers:

The latest non-farm payrolls data were much better than the drop of 525,000 that economists were expecting and was nearly half of the average monthly decline during the last six months. Although the number remains painfully high, it is a sharp improvement from April’s revised 504,000 and offers hope that the economy’s free-fall could be ending.

While the unemployment has reached 9.4 per cent, there is hope that the job losses are subsiding. With a much lower number of job losses for May, there are indications that the rapid pace of employment hemorrhaging is slowing. From the economic standpoint, it is expected that the economy will stop losing jobs and hopefully start adding them.

The U.S. economy is expected to halt its slide into recession in the latter half of this year, with true recovery expected to make a beginning by 2010. There is hope that things will improve markedly soon, and the most recent payroll numbers provide an indication that this might happen.

The news also indicates that the U.S. dollar is likely to weaken in forex trading, since it will no longer be needed as a safe haven currency as the economy -- and risk appetite -- picks up.