Unemployment rate contained by shrinking labour force

An exodus of discouraged workers from the job market kept the US unemployment rate from climbing above 10 per cent in December, economists said. Had the labour force not decreased by 661,000 last month, the jobless rate would have been 10.4 per cent, according to economists including David Rosenberg at Gluskin Sheff & Associates in Toronto and Harm Bandholz at UniCredit Research in New York.