Let’s hope it’s an omen for Sunday’s Super Bowl: The nation’s jobless rate fell to 8.3 percent last month, after employers created a net 243,000 jobs. It’s the biggest monthly increase in nine months.

The latest numbers bode well for Massachusetts, which will release its latest jobs stats in a few weeks. More than likely, it will also show an improving jobs picture. A few more months like this, and people will start feeling better about the economy and the confidence could spill over into other economic areas, such as housing. We’ll see.

As for Sunday’s game, well, this news really has nothing to do with it. But it sure would help our confidence if the Pats win.

File under: Go Pats!

The latest S&P/Case-Shiller Index is in. Don’t hold your breath. It showed continued housing price declines in November, including in the Boston area.

The bottom line: U.S. prices fell an additional 3.7 percent in November compared to the year before, higher than what most economists had expected.

Here’s one hoot: Detroit actually saw an increase in prices. Considering how low the city has sunk, Detroit practically had no where else to go but up.

File under:

Paul Samuelson says it’s somewhat understandable why the Federal Reserve last decade missed all the signs pointing toward an eventual housing crisis: There was no long-term perspective.

By that, Sameulson means there hadn’t been a full-blown financial crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression, and so Fed officials just couldn’t see a crisis coming because they had never seen a crisis coming before. He notes that the Fed, for decades, had viewed its primary job as “smoothing out” business cycles, not watching out for mega-storms, and that sometimes polices to ensure short-term prosperity actually create unseen long-term problems.

Boston Federal Reserve Bank president Eric Rosengren once said roughly the same thing.

After the 2008 Wall Street disaster, Rosengren noted that the main thing policy makers learned was that they needed to learn a lot more about financial markets and the potential for financial meltdowns. The problem is that a full-blown financial crisis is sort of like Haley’s Comet: It only comes around now and then, so there’s not a lot of time to fully observe and collect data on it before it’s come and gone.

Here’s an impressive chart showing that metropolitan Boston, on a per capita basis, is the ninth wealthiest city in the world. There are six U.S. cities in the top 10. Washington, San Jose and San Francisco are three of the other five. You’ll be hard pressed to guess the other two — one of which is tops in the world.

The state’s unemployment rate fell to 6.8 percent last month, providing yet more proof that the Bay State economy is performing considerably better than the national economy.

But there is one confusing bit of news: A separate study shows a net decline in the number of payroll jobs last month. You might be thinking: How can that be if the jobless rate is falling? Well, as far as we can determine, the payroll numbers and jobless rate are determined through two different surveys, so they can sometimes have slightly different results.

Still, we’ll take the good news. The trend over the past 18 months has been a slowly improving employment picture in Massachusetts — and the unemployment rate for December follows that pattern.

File under: Glass half full