Younglai writes that the “country’s jobless rate fell to 6.3 per cent in July, its lowest level in nearly a decade”. This is a tad exaggerated: the unemployment rate in October 2008 was 6.2%, not even nine years previous. Also, the monthly data are much too volatile to be meaningful. If one looks instead at a three-month centred moving average of unemployment and labour force data, calculating the smoothed unemployment rate from their ratio, the unemployment rate was still 6.5% in June (a month of timeliness is lost in smoothing), unchanged from May, and the same level as in November 2008.