The U.S. unemployment rate made a slight recovery in January, as it dropped to 9.7 percent, indicating a slight upswing in the labor market.

A Labor Department report showed that about a half a million Americans found work in January, pushing the jobless rate to the lowest mark since last August.

President Barrack Obama announced a temporary increase in SBA loans today, a move designed to encourage small business hiring.

Over 4 million Americans have lost their jobs since Obama took office in January of 2009.  The president’s team of economic advisers had originally predicted that that the nearly $800 billion stimulus plan would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent.

But some are still optimistic.  “The long winter of this Great Recession seems to be drawing to a close,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York told Business Week Magazine. “There is no ‘new normal’ or structural impediment to this recovery.”

State and local governments lost 41,000 jobs, while the federal government continued to grow, adding 33,000 to the payroll.