Article, CNN.com, February 25
http://money.cnn.com For the past two years, economists have been claiming that the U.S. was going through a "jobless recovery." This means that the economy was churning at a growing rate - companies were producing more and people were spending more. This also meant that many firms, because they were bouncing back from an economic downturn, where still skittish about hiring new employees. They were content with pushing their current employees to produce at higher levels because they weren't confident that the economy would continue to move in an upward direction.
It appears that these skittish feeling may be starting to subside. The weekly jobless claims declined in the second half of January to about 300,000, which is about 50,000 less than in prior weeks. The Conference Board's Help Wanted Index (measures column inches of help-wanted ads in newspapers as a gauge of hiring) also rose in January to it highest level in two years.
