Mr. Robillard: Clearly we've had up trends in the temporary employment numbers, which continued in May. You are seeing continued accelerated year-on-year growth for temp numbers, and part of that is obviously a function of easy comparables. The big question, in our view, is after backing out the census hires, is job creation slowing? Our viewpoint here is it's hard to get excited about this group, and it's hard to get excited about these stocks at current levels without any real good visibility into accelerating job growth. I believe if we are going to see growth here in the U.S., it is going to be subpar growth relative to the levels exiting the last two recessions. It was very unique how the U.S. went into this recession. And because of that, I believe many of the employment "rules of thumb" will be clearly redefined. The old rule of thumb was that roughly five or six months after temp trends turned, you would start to see the acceleration in perm job growth. Obviously we're past that because November was when you first started to see the temp trends improve. Therefore, we have clearly extended past the old rule of thumb, and my view is since this was the worst recession in 70 years, there is likely to be a new rule for how we are going to go up from here. I think you will continue to see job growth, it will simply be slower than prior historical trends. And there is the potential over the next month or two for some contraction. The number that worries me the most is more along the lines of the unemployment number because a lot of people are not focused on that. The interesting part with the number is that it only focuses on those people that are actually looking for a job. You could certainly get into a situation where you see a couple of hundred thousand jobs being created but the unemployment rate is ticking up because what you are going to get is people get off the couch and realize on that, okay, now it's worth the time to put my resume back out there because it looks like people are hiring again. I wouldn't be surprised to see that number floating around its current level for the rest of the year.
Tickers included in this excerpt: ADEN, BA, KELYA, KFRC, MAN, MWW, RAND, RHI, SFN, TBI
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