Yes, yesterday initial claims improved a bit yesterday , but today’s monthly job figures are horrible, with unemployment (U-3) staying at 8.2%, and only 80K jobs, less than needed to match population growth.

As Felix Salmon notes, the real problem is that government payrolls have been slashed for the past year or so, as people make invocations to the austerity fairy.

BTW, while the U-3 unemployment rate was flat, but the less conservative, and to my mind more representative, U-6 unemployment rate rose to 14.9%.

Not good news.