Particular interest was focused on the strongly falling weekly US continuing claims number, which was down a solid 148,000 from the previous week, the first drop since January. This will give the green shoots crowd some reason for hope, but there is an awful lot of wood to chop before we are likely to see the unemployment rate falling again in the US. The initial jobless claims number needs to drop consistently and the payrolls numbers will need to begin to turn to consistently outright positive levels before we can call a bottom, but this does give hope that the US job market's deterioration is slowing.