Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. recession may have ended in July as the labor market improved, a member of the committee that dates American business cycles said.

“I haven’t felt that there have been any previous months for saying this will turn out to be the bottom, but this one is definitely a candidate,” Jeffrey Frankel, who sits on the National Bureau of Economic Research’s business-cycle dating committee, said today in a telephone interview. “It’s perfectly possible that this will turn out to be it.”

The pace of U.S. job losses slowed more than forecast last month and the unemployment rate dropped for the first time since April 2008, a Labor Department report showed today. Payrolls fell by 247,000 after a 443,000 loss in June, and the jobless rate unexpectedly slipped to 9.4 percent from 9.5 percent. Stock indexes soared after the report and 10-year Treasuries headed for the worst week since 2003.

“This is definite moderation,” said Frankel, a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the same time, he said, even if the economy expands in the second half of the year “we still wouldn’t be out of the woods” because “there’s always the possibility of a double dip.”

The White House cautioned today that the jobless rate is still likely to reach 10 percent. With companies from Boeing Co. to Verizon Communications Inc. continuing to cut costs, any rebound in hiring may not come until 2010.

‘Huge Distance’

“We are still a huge distance from putting employment back on its normal growth track,” Robert Hall, a Stanford University professor who heads the NBER committee, said today in an e-mail.

The committee, also based in Cambridge, defines a recession as a “significant” decrease in economic activity over a sustained period of time. The decline would be visible in gross domestic product, payrolls, industrial production, sales and incomes.

The panel said the U.S. recession began in December 2007. Since then, the economy has lost about 6.7 million jobs.

To contact the reporter on this story: Timothy Homan in Washington at thoman1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 7, 2009 14:09 EDT