a tiny bit better than the 153,000 jobs per month that was the average for all of 2011. The US unemployment rate ticks up a tenth-point to 7.9 per cent The issue, of course, is that the number of people who have stopped looking for jobs because they can't find any is still enormous, and once you stop looking, you drop out of the unemployment stats. There are still 12.3 million people who want jobs who cannot find them, and at the current rate of job creation it would take 6.5 years to find everyone jobs. That never happens, of course, because economies have a certain level of structural unemployment, which in the United States was hovering between 4.5 and 5 per cent ahead of the Great Recession. But you need something on the order of 100,000 to 200,000 net new jobs to be created in the US to keep up with population growth, depending on which economist you ask, and the real fear is that the new level of structural unemployment, given the jitteriness of the global economy and the difficulty that people have in selling their homes (and therefore moving to a new area to get a job if they don't have one) have combined to create a new higher level of structural unemployment that is in the range of 6 to 6.5 per cent -- and maybe even higher. The other issue that is interwoven with unemployment is partial employment, with US employers reluctant to give employees