I’ll start with the caveats: A tenth of percentage point isn’t much, two months do not a trend make, and these figures sometimes get revised dramatically. Having said all that, there’s something remarkable about the latest unemployment numbers, chronicled earlier today at STL JobWatch: We’ve now seen the St. Louis jobless rate stay below the national average for two months in a row. In May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated the jobless rate as 9.0 percent in St. Louis and 9.1 percent nationwide. In April, the gap was wider: 8.0 percent here, 8.6 percent nationally. (These figures are not seasonally adjusted.)

It’s the first time that has happened since late 2003 and early 2004, when St. Louis had a below-average unemployment rate for four straight months.  As the chart above shows, we had a better-than-average unemployment rate for most of the 1990s, then tracked the U.S. rate closely for a few years before beginning our lamentable five-year streak of not being able to beat the national average.