Surprise rise in jobless rate gives Fed breathing room

From marketwatch.com

When Congress cut off unemployment checks for 2 million people at the beginning of the year, everyone expected lots of people who’d been out of work for a long time to stop pretending to look for work and to officially drop out of the labor force. And if they dropped out, the unemployment rate would fall for all the wrong reasons. It hasn’t happened yet, at least according to the monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February, the number of people in the labor force actually increased by 264,000 after a gain of 523,000 in January. In two months, the labor force has grown by more than ... (full story)