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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StanX Long who wrote (58420)	1/4/2002 8:04:02 PM
From: StanX Long	Respond to of 70976

Friday January 4, 5:39 pm Eastern Time Job Cuts Slow, Raising Hopes on Economy By Caren Bohan biz.yahoo.com WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The furious pace of U.S. layoffs that followed the Sept. 11 attacks slackened in December but the unemployment rate jumped to its highest level since April 1995, the government said on Friday. Overall, the latest jobs data from the U.S. Labor Department kept alive hopes that the recession, which began in March, was winding down and helped spur gains in stock prices. ``Before you can start to have an expansion you have to stop the bleeding, and this is another set of numbers that indicate we are reaching a bottom,'' said Delos Smith, economist at the Conference Board, business research group in New York. The number of workers on U.S. payrolls outside the farm sector fell a seasonally adjusted 124,000 in December after a 371,000 drop in November. The November figure was originally reported as a slightly milder decline of 331,000. The unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent. For November, the rate was revised to 5.6 percent from 5.7 percent, a change made as part of an annual overhaul of the series. ``You don't want to characterize this as a strong report by any means but it does indicate that things are starting to improve,'' said economist Ed McKelvey of Goldman Sachs.