Brighter Days?

Despite a week of generally positive economic news, the U.S. economy has a long way to go toward health, as the latest monthly unemployment report showed.

Employers shed a fewer-than-expected 36,000 jobs in February. But the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent. That means roughly 10 million Americans are still without jobs. And employers are still firing, not hiring.

Otherwise, it was a week of generally positive economic news, Thursday morning saw a trio of reports that show the U.S. could be slowly emerging from its long economic nightmare.

Yesterday’s reports showed a sharp drop in the weekly number of first-time unemployment claims, a sharp rise in productivity in the last quarter, and an increase in factory orders led by demand for aircraft.

First-time jobless claims stood at 469,000 for the week ended February 27, down 29,000 from the previous week and the lowest since January.

"It's a big drop, and we're moving in the right direction, but we're still not really at the level where I would hope we would be," Tim Quinlan, economic analyst at Wells Fargo, tells CNN. "It seems like the gradual improvement we saw at the end of last year is leveling off at this point."

Those filing continuing unemployment claims fell to 4,500,000, a drop of 134,000 from the previous week’s 4,634,000.

While unemployment claims fell in the last week, productivity has been on the rise as companies squeeze more work out of fewer workers. Employee output per hour in the last quarter of 2009 rose 6.9 percent, the highest rate since 2002. And that could be a sign that employers could soon begin to start hiring again.

“Businesses have done a superb but ultimately unsustainable job of utilizing the labor resources at their disposal,” Richard DeKaser, chief economist at Woodley Park Research in Washington, told Bloomberg. “They’ve experienced rising output level without increasing employment to a degree that can’t persist.”

And finally, this morning’s report on factory orders showed their biggest increase in four months, led by commercial aircraft orders. Factory orders rose 1.7 percent, the best gain since September, driven by a 117 percent surge in orders for aircraft. February’s gain was the ninth gain in 10 months for U.S. manufacturers, bolstering the idea that the recovery could at least in part be led by improvement to the manufacturing sector.

Besides the reports out today, there were other good signs for the U.S. economy this week. The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a collection of anecdotal reports from across the country, showed Thursday that nine of 12 regional banks saw improvements in local economies. St. Louis and Atlanta showed mixed performance, and Richmond was buried under feet of snow, slowing economic activity.

Companies planned fewer job cuts in February than in any month since 2006, according to a report by Challenger Gray & Christmas.

The Chicago company tracks how many people businesses say they plan to lay off nationwide.

In February, the firm tallied 42,090, down from 71,482 in January and down significantly from the 186,350 job cuts announced in February 2009. January 2009 was the worst month for job cuts in seven years, with 241,749.

“Most economists agree that a recovery is well underway,” said CEO John Challenger.

One other sign of that improvement could be seen in the high-tech realm driven by global as much as U.S. demand, the Phoenix Business Journal reported.

Semiconductor sales rose on both a month-to-month basis and year-over-year in January, continuing an industry trend that started last summer.

January sales totaled $22.5 billion globally, according to the monthly report of the Semiconductor Industry Association. That was 47.2 percent better than January 2009’s results of $15.3 billion, just as the economic turmoil was cresting. The numbers also were 0.3 percent better than December’s total of $22.4 billion.

But for all the seemingly good news, some 10 million Americans remain unemployed. And another report out today shows just how stubborn this downturn is.

The National Association of Realtors reported that pending home sales—in the sector at the heart of the downturn—unexpectedly fell 7.6 percent, based on contracts signed in January. Analysts had expected a January rise of 1 percent.

That’s the bad news that seems to come along with every bit of good news about the economy these days.

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