Figures released late last week by the state Department of Labor put the December unemployment rate for the city at a seasonally adjusted 10.6%, its highest in more than a decade and higher than either New York State or the nation as a whole. "If you look closely at the underlying unemployment rate numbers, the number of employed New York City residents was flat in October and November, then fell sharply in December," she tells GlobeSt.com. "This looks rather volatile, which leads me to think that there was a data collection problem somewhere in there."

Since the state's unemployment forecasts are based on household surveys rather than employer reports, Denham thinks the job-loss figures--i.e. the numbers of positions that were actually eliminated--provide a more accurate barometer of the local economic weather. For one thing, she says, the state projections are based on fairly small samples; for another, some of the survey respondents may reverse-commute to the city's western, northern or eastern suburbs, and their job losses do not reflect downsizing by city-based employers.

State Labor Department figures show that the five boroughs lost 67,500 private-sector jobs between December 2008 and December 2009, a 2.1% drop. That's comparable with the rate of job elimination in several other metro areas across the Empire State, including Albany-Schenectady-Troy, Buffalo-Niagara Falls, Long Island and the city's northern suburbs, although higher than in some upstate areas.