New Jobs Numbers Signal End of an Economic Era

In the book of United States economic history, the November jobs numbers released on Friday would make a fitting end to a particularly long, terrifying chapter that began nine years ago. The unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent, the Labor Department said, from 4.9 percent. The last time it was this low was August 2007. That was the month, you may recall, when global money markets first froze up because of losses on United States mortgage-related bonds: early tremors of what would become a recession four months later and a global financial crisis nine months after that.