The consumer will be feeling a little bit squeezed in 2006.

It's a rude interruption of that string of nine straight monthly job gains.

It's pretty good job growth. Revised numbers show job growth was stronger than we thought in the second half of last year.

What's happening is not so much that more people are leaving but that fewer people are coming. Our housing prices are pretty daunting, even more so than two years ago.

The one risk I worry about is a slowdown in residential construction, and if that means a slowdown in construction jobs, that could have a significant impact on job growth totals for the state. A lot of our job gains have been construction and construction-related. At one time, as much as 40 percent of job gains were related to building things.

That's the major risk, but nobody has told the construction sector in California because they were again the leading job growth sector (in December).