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Unemployment falls to a four-year low, consumer confidence dips, and more in our roundup of the business stories that are making news and driving opinion

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1. JOB GROWTH BRINGS UNEMPLOYMENT TO FOUR-YEAR LOW

The economy added 146,000 non-farm jobs in November, pushing the unemployment down from 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent, the lowest it's been in four years. Last month's job gains were far better than expected — economists had predicted a rather meager gain of just 93,000 jobs — partly because Hurricane Sandy didn't slow down hiring in the Northeast as much as feared. The news buoyed stocks, but just a bit, as the Labor Department shaved 33,000 off its previous estimate of October's job growth, bringing it down to 138,000. Also, some of the decrease in the unemployment rate stemmed from the fact that more people gave up looking for work. "The labor market is not getting worse," says Jacob Oubina, a senior U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York, "but is also not getting much better." [Reuters]

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.