The Nashville area led the nation in job growth last year, with a 3.9 percent increase from 2011 to 2012, according to revised labor data recently released.

Revised 2012 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows job growth in the Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area — which includes Davidson County and surrounding areas including Franklin and Murfreesboro — was highest among other metropolitan areas with populations greater than 1 million.

Houston came in a close second, with 3.83 percent job growth, followed by Austin, Texas, with 3.55 percent.

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Nashville saw job grown of .5 percent from November 2011 to November 2012, ranking the city third of Tennessee's four major metropolitan areas, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Chattanooga enjoyed the best growth of the quartet, with a 1.7 percent jobs numbers increase. Knoxville (1.2 percent) was second, while Memphis (unchanged) was fourth.

As a whole, Tennessee experienced job growth of .9 percent.

The trend is unmistakable: Job growth in the Nashville MSA has petered out as 2012 has progressed. The data housed at MTSU's Business and Economic Research Center is clear on that. But look beyond the top line and there is some solace to be had.

Our four largest private-sector employment groups — education/health, professional/business services, retail and leisure, which combine for more than half our jobs base — all grew by at least 1 percent in the year ended Aug. 30. Worth noting is that health and education jobs grew at their fastest pace in 10 months while retail hiring held its own during a summer that was rough on many other sectors. (Word that HCA will bring hundreds of new jobs to Midtown over the next few years will help sustain that trend.)

Admittedly, even those numbers are no great shakes. But they do offset losses in other sectors such as government, finance and wholesale trade. And you can't help but think that the slam-the-brakes slowdown in professional services hiring growth has something to do with the looming fiscal cliff. Resolve that issue and there's a good chance we bounce back to growth of 4 percent or more.

So we're not really adding jobs but, if it's any consolation, the number of people filing for unemployment benefits is at its lowest since early 2008.

Thank goodness for Nissan and General Motors.

The latest batch of Nashville MSA employment growth numbers shows that the region's job base grew by 0.5 percent in 2011. December's year-over-year growth rate was the slowest of 2011 and was dragged down by losses in the information, transportation and government sectors, among others. On the positive side was manufacturing, where the region's auto giants have been ramping up in recent months. Also contributing strongly were the amorphous professional services and other services groups.

The firm expects unemployment to keep rising, in fact, pushing the monthly rate above 10 percent, giving rise to another batch of quantitative easing from the Fed. “We remain of the view that there is unlikely to be a material improvement in the employment data between now and the second half of next year,” economists Michelle Meyer and Neil Dutta tell clients. “The economy will manage to cobble together employment gains but not enough to keep the unemployment rate from rising.”

Did companies receive the memo to fire, yet miss the other one, with the much more critical rhyming verb? Never fear - the BLS has an explanation for everything, and the surge in claims was presumably not only predictable, it was expected, and was blamed on the fact that there was a federal holiday in the prior week.