Black Friday has come and gone and the holiday shopping season is off and running. In addition to keeping on eye on how retailers are doing, there will be plenty of other economic data for analysts and investors to peruse on this week.

• Monday: Chicago Fed's Midwest Manufacturing Index
• Tuesday: Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index, Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, S&P/Case-Schiller Home Price Index for Q3, Johnson Redbook Retail Sales Index

It will be a busy week. Republicans are poised to gain control of the House of Representatives and gain governorships in Tuesday's mid-term elections. Also, the Federal Reserve is expected to announce another round of quantitative easing Wednesday, following the FOMC meeting. Major retailers are scheduled to report October same-store sales Thursday, while the October unemployment rate, announced on Friday, is expected to remain at 9.6%.

Toyota's (TM) fiscal second-quarter results will be one of the highlights on the earnings front this week. After three periods of way underestimating Toyota's earnings, have the analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters got it right this time? The stock sure could use a boost. Teva Pharmaceuticals (TEVA) is in a similar situation; i.e., high expectations for this week's quarterly results but a stock in need of a boost. Marathon (MRO) and Starbucks (SBUX) are also expected to post strong earnings growth this week, but both stocks are riding high.

The tell-tale stat for investors in the September job report released by the U.S. Department of Labor? The underemployment rate, technically known as U-6, which increased to 17.1% from 16.7% in August.

U-6 measures those unemployed, and others working part-time who want full-time work but can't find it. A year ago, the underemployment rate was at 16.1%.

September's 17.1% underemployment rate translates into 14.8 million Americans unemployed, and another 7million to 8 million underemployed, to total about 22-23 million Americans that want full-time work who can't find it.

Stock futures inched higher ahead of the opening bell after the Labor Department reported weekly dropped by 11,000 last week to 445,000. While this was better than expectations that called for a slight increase, the total amount of claims are still hovering at a reading that doesn't indicate significant hiring or firing is taking place.

The four-week average of new claims fell by 3,000 to 455,750. The four-week claim is considered less volatile than the weekly data. Continuing jobless claims also dropped 48,000 to 4.46 million. Continuing jobless claims are workers who continue to receive regular weekly benefits. This data follows Wednesday's ADP data that indicated private employers cut jobs last month.

The U.S. lost fewer jobs than expected in August. Here are the key stats, as reported in the New York Times:

• The economy lost another 54,000 jobs last month.
• Private companies added 67,000 jobs.
• The unemployment rate rose to 9.6% from 9.5%.
• The government lost 121,000 jobs in August.
• State and local governments cut 10,000 jobs and another 114,000 temporary census positions.

Investors are digesting a bit of bad news concerning the economy, as initial applications for unemployment insurance increased to 500,000 during the past week.

The 12,000-claim rise suggests that the economy is slowing and that employers are cutting jobs. The last time initial claims for unemployment insurance were this high was back in November. The latest data does not include millions of unemployed receiving extended insurance, which is paid for by the federal government. Roughly 5.6 million unemployed workers were on this extended insurance as of the end of July.

July's U.S. nonfarm payroll report by the U.S. Labor Department, commonly known as the monthly jobs report, was hardly something to write home about: an increase of 71,000 private sector jobs, after subtracting government jobs.

That's well below the 100,000 to 125,000 new jobs the U.S. economy needs to generate monthly just to keep the unemployment rate from rising.

Clearly, the nation has to do much better, but July's jobs report was not 'all-bad.' For the record, Ellen Zentner, a senior U.S. macroeconomist for Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, found a few rays of light.

The Labor Department just released June jobs data, revealing a drop stemming from the layoffs of temporary census workers. This drop was partially offset as private employers added a "modest number" of jobs (pegged at 83,000 workers). The 125,000 jobs eliminated was the most since October, with 225,000 eliminated temporary census jobs leading the way.

Some may look at the fact that the unemployment rate dropped from 9.7% to 9.5% as good news, but that may not be the case.

Considering that payrolls rose by 431,000 in May, including 411,000 census workers, and that the unemployment rate fell to 9.7%, you might assume that this large increase would spark a rally in stocks. Wrong!

Economists had projected a gain of 536,000, the median forecast by Bloomberg News. So in a flash, traders decided that the numbers missed the mark and stock futures sold off immediately with the Dow futures down more than 100 points.

Under the radar: Some trends are obvious enough and visible to all investors. Others are more-subtle, but are just as potent, and these often slip 'under the radar.'

Case in point: U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner may have telegraphed that conditions on the job creation front are improving, including a possible large gain in jobs in April. "You're starting to see the first signs of what we think will be a sustained period of job growth by private companies," Geithner said in an interview Monday on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program.

That the job creation task ahead for policy makers and executives alike is significant would be an understatement. The task is, arguably, as great as any economic endeavor since the restructuring of the U.S. economy for armaments production during the mobilization for World War II.

Here are the basics: the U.S. Labor Department puts the number of unemployed persons at 15 million as of the end of March, roughly 8.4 million of which stems from the 2007-2009 recession.

According to an Associated Press survey of leading economists, jobs and home values will stay unstable into 2011. The survey indicates that the recovery is going to continue trudging along through the year, which should prompt the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates near zero. Three-fourths of the economists surveyed believe that the interest rates will stay low until the final quarter of 2010.

Other highlights from the survey (if you can call them highlights) include the belief that the unemployment rate will stay "stubbornly high" during the next two years. The group believes that the unemployment rate will drop to 9.3% by the end of this year and will drop to 8.4% at the end of 2011.

The staggering stat in March's employment report from the U.S. Department of Labor?

Arguably, it's U-6, the broader gauge of U.S. unemployment, which includes discouraged workers and those who are working part-time who want full-time work. U-6 rose to a staggering 16.9% in March from 16.8% in February.

Periodically in economic analysis, you have to pull the lens back to see the bigger picture, and that's certainly the case with the U.S. job market. The most recent report from the U.S. Labor Department revealed that the world's largest economy added 162,000 jobs in March.

At first glance, in an economy that had lost 8.5 million jobs in the most severe recession since the Great Depression, a net gain of 162,000 jobs is a minuscule amount.

So, the good news and the bad news from the jobs report ... let's start with the good.

In March, the U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs, the largest one-month increase in three years. The unemployment rate held steady at 9.7% as the labor force increased by 398,000. Many, yours truly included, warned that we need to take this data with a grain of salt, thanks to temporary workers hired to help with the U.S. census report. According to the data, just 48,000 of the 162,000 jobs added came from the census.