While the unemployment rate – which is based on a different survey – ticked higher last month to 9 per cent it is nonetheless 0.8 percentage points lower than it was in November, a relatively rapid decline by historic standards. Private-sector job growth has been strong enough to more than offset government layoffs, particularly at the state and local level. A particularly encouraging sign is the rapid growth of manufacturing jobs over the past year and the recent broadening strength in services employment. While the exact pace of a jobs market recovery is always hard to  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  predict, we were expecting the rate of job growth to pick up over the first half, and I am hopeful that job growth will continue to strengthen in the coming months. We would welcome this. Even if the economy added 300,000 jobs per month from now on, we would likely still have considerable labor market slack at the end of 2012. Despite these clearly encouraging signs, there are still some downside risks to the growth outlook that bear watching. Let me list them for you:   As I mentioned earlier, high oil and commodity prices have cut into household purchasing power, a difficult situation for many families that could constrain overall spending more than I anticipate.   The renewed decline in home prices could dampen consumer spending and housing activity more than I expect.
However, there are some signs that the economy has stabilized in recent months. Regional employment trends Now, let me turn specifically to employment trends in the region, the focus of our briefing today. In particular, we want to describe our region’s experience during the recession and recovery. Nationally, the Great Recession, which began in December 2007, has been the deepest economic downturn since World War II. At the jobs trough in February 2010 – about 7 months after the official end of the recession – the country had lost almost 6.5 percent of its jobs and the unemployment rate had more than doubled. Many people lost their jobs or saw their hours or income cut, and the duration of unemployment for jobless workers reached a historical high. For many families, this distress was compounded by losses of wealth from declining home prices and stock market losses. Since the jobs trough, unemployment has retreated by a percentage point and jobs growth has resumed, albeit at a slow pace. Today, we will review questions about jobs in our region such as: How severe was the downturn? Where are jobs returning? And, what factors affect the employment outlook? As in other parts of the country, employment in our region declined substantially during the recession. But, New York and New Jersey and Puerto Rico had very different experiences. Employment in much of New York State, including New York City, declined less severely than the nation. Both the state and city lost about 3.8 percent of their jobs.