The rate of decline in employment moderated substantially in May, according to the BLS figures released June 5, to about half the monthly rate of job loss recorded over the preceding six months (345,000 vs. 642,000). The news was received in a variety of ways.
First, the cynics. They tend to wax sarcastic at the idea of “things are not getting worse quite as fast as they were” as a good-news proposition. But a wide variety of recent data indicate that the economy is no longer in the state of free-fall that it entered last September, and this is indeed good news. To begin to level off is the first step toward the start of the recovery.