Some trickles of job hope...

If you're looking for hope in dismal job numbers, here's a trickle of it, mixed in with unsettling numbers:

From the Associated Press:

"There are about 6.1 unemployed workers, on average, competing for each job opening, a Labor Department report shows. That's down slightly from 6.2 last month, the most since the department began tracking job openings nine years ago.
It's a sharp increase from only 1.7 workers per opening when the recession began in December 2007.
The department's Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey said employers advertised about 2.5 million job openings at the end of September, up slightly from the previous month. That's down from a peak of 4.8 million openings in June 2007."

I realize that's not the greatest news. But it's on the right track.

The hope is that businesses will have no choice but to start hiring again, once they've trimmed production and labor to the point that they can't be trimmed any more.