I searched in vain through news reports over the weekend for an explanation of how unemployment could decline in January, from 10 percent to 9.7 percent, when job losses grew, albeit by only 20,000.

Surely, I thought, the explanation lay in a decline in the labor force because unemployed workers had given up looking, which is the usual explanation for a decline in unemployment that's accompanied by more job losses.

Not this time, as it turns out. Indeed, the labor participation rate increased significantly. So what's the explanation this time around?

There isn't a good one, except that one finding is based on a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of households and the other on a BLS survey of employers.

That suggests that one of these numbers isn't entirely accurate and will be revised. Here's hoping it's the jobs number. True, the small increase in November was revised to a loss, and the December losses were nearly doubled on revision, from the 85,000 that were initially reported to 150,000.

But with more people in January reporting they are employed somewhere, there's reason to believe that the job losses reported for that month will reversed to a gain, and that the worst may be behind us.

That's not to say the near-term future is suddenly much necessarily brighter. The BLS report for January contained decidedly "mixed signals," noted Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution.  

 "U.S. employers have been very fast to slash payrolls in the face of perceived weaknesses in current and future demand," Burtless explained. "Their response has produced a quick rebound in business profitability, but it has also given rise to an unusually steep fall in U.S. employment and a painful increase in the price of being unemployed."

Until that changes, consumer demand is likely to remain weak, and any recovery not much to write home about.

UPDATE: A blogger over at The Big Picture notes that there were some tweaks to the data that do indeed reduce the workforce as well as some other elements in the findings that make him doubt that the employment picture is improving as much as the household survey suggests it is. But it's hard to know how far they go to explain the size of the drop in unemployment. Guess we'll have to wait until next month to find out.