California Jobless Rate At All Time Low But San Francisco Chronicle Sees Problem

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

California's unemployment rate fell to a 30-year low 4.5 percent in October. During the same month, employers added a modest 9,300 new payroll jobs, the state Employment Development Department said Friday.

The state's unemployment rate is now the lowest it has been since California began tracking it in 1976, according to the department. It was 5.2 percent in October 2005 and 4.8 percent this past September.

"It looks like, unless things really go bad, we'll average below a 5 percent (unemployment rate) for the year," said Howard Roth, chief economist for the California Department of Finance. "The only other time we've done that was at the top of the peak of the tech boom in 2000."

Unemployment rates were even lower in the Bay Area. In the East Bay, the Oakland-Fremont-Hayward area rate was 3.9 percent. For San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, it was 3.5 percent. On the Peninsula, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara had a 4.2 percent unemployment rate.

"The Bay Area and Oakland (region) in particular is doing the best (of job markets in the state) now," Roth said.

But the number of new jobs created in the state -- a figure that some economists trust more to gauge the labor market's health -- was mildly disappointing. From January through September, employers had been averaging creation of 13,900 jobs per month. October's slower pace will drag down the year's average.

"People are still employed -- that's what the low unemployment rate tells me. But new jobs are not being added to the economy at a very fast pace," said Sean Snaith, a consultant to Stockton's University of the Pacific Forecasting Center.

The liberal MSM is pretty amazing.All time unemployment rate but problems.If there were a Democratic Governor,I think things would be reported better.The only major downside here is real estate has stopped appreciating in many parts of California with good employment numbers.