Market prognosticators are making few definitive calls before the November congressional elections, but August's mixed jobs data got a thorough going-over as forecasters looked for signs of hope.

With the unemployment rate rising to 9.6% on a net loss of 54,000 non-farm jobs, the report did not exactly signal an economic revival.

Still, the news wasn t all bad. Although jobs were lost in August, the net decline was less than half the expected figure, and that was enough to jolt stocks again, after the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst August on a percentage basis since 2001.

The Dow closed up 128 points on Friday, up 2.9% for the week. The S&P 500 climbed 14 points, up 3.8% for the week.

Traders appeared to look past the headline numbers of the Labor Department report and instead cheer the details. The private sector added 67,000 jobs last month, a sign that progress may persist, according to PNC chief economist Stuart Hoffman.

In a Friday note, Hoffman said the jobs report reveals "the highly nuanced nature of economic data," which allowed for a loss of mostly census-related government jobs but still remained "supportive of an ongoing, but half-speed (or less), recovery."

Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, said Friday that "the labor market has entered a holding pattern." The private sector's monthly average gains of 78,000 in June through August are "not nearly enough to begin to reduce unemployment."

David Rosenberg, perennially-bearish chief economist and strategist for Gluskin Sheff, didn't deviate from his view that the U.S. is in a continuing, long-term Japanese-style depression, but he conceded that the jobs report didn t necessarily herald a break in the recovery.

"Dodging a bullet, yes; out of the woods, no," he wrote Friday, adding that report "was hardly strong, but admittedly, is not consistent with the economy contracting this quarter."

Barry Knapp, U.S. strategist for Barclays Capital, summed up the critical question in a report published Aug. 30: "Stuck in a rut; how do we get out?"

There's no easy route. Knapp lowered his S&P 12-month target to 1,120, and said a number of factors must fall into place for that to occur. Those include some combination of an extension of the Bush tax cuts, a change in control of Congress, reductions in earnings estimates to sustainable levels in the market, looser bank regulations and a restart of the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy.

At the very least, some recent data are turning up "what passes for good news," according to Federated Investors' chief equity market strategist Phil Orlando. The recent revision of the second-quarter growth rate, to 1.6%, was "certainly not great [but] was two ticks higher than consensus expectations," he noted in an Aug. 27 commentary.

At the data-driven ISI Group, economist and founder Ed Hyman on Friday pointed to a "surprising package of better data," including the jobs report, stronger than expected house prices on the Case-Shiller index, an uptick in manufacturing activity and chain-store sales that were better than forecast.

However, Hyman cautioned that these developments should, at best, stave off the worst-case forecasts. "The data above argue against a double-dip [recession], but not against a soft patch."

Aneta Markowska, a U.S. economist for Societe General, pointed out Thursday that huge amounts of cash on corporate America's books have held up the typical pattern of economic recovery and job growth.

"The things that normally drive employment growth profits and production gains have certainly been in place during this recovery cycle," she wrote. "They have produced some employment growth, but the magnitude of the jobs recovery has been disappointing."

And with another few months of political deadlock looming, the labor market could remain a serious drag on recovery.

"A prolonged period of elevated unemployment presents many problems for policymakers," she wrote. "The biggest question of all is whether the Fed can do anything about it."