Interest rates rises have returned to the American political and business agenda, hurried on by the huge improvement in US unemployment in November.

Jobs were still lost, but the trend has changed and some analysts reckon there will be a small positive in the jobs creation column for December and or January. If that happens, the rate rise speculation will be the dominant speculation in the opening months of 2010.

That’s seen the US dollar turn upwards, the yen, euro, Australian dollar, gold, oil and other speculative favourites ease.

And there are moves in the US by the Obama Administration to raid the so-called TARP money that America’s banks are repaying (Bank of America is the latest to repay, with its plans to return $US46 billion) for a jobs stimulus package next year (that won’t be repaid).

President Obama is to lay out job creation strategies in a speech next tomorrow night in the US that could see this raid idea fleshed out.

US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner says the TARP money is being repaid in greater volumes by banks and that he expected $US175 billion to come back by the end of 2010. “That’s substantially more than we anticipated even just a few months ago,” Geithner said at the weekend.

Doing this means the government doesn’t have to try and push another package through Congress in an election year, which could see it halted or delayed.

That statement was made at the same time as US bank regulators closed six more banks to take the total so far this year to 130. Included in the list was one failure — AmTrust Bank of Cleveland, Ohio, which had assets of $US12 billion and deposits of $US8 billion and will cost the US taxpayer about $US2 billion.

But those failures were overshadowed by the news the economy shed only 11,000 jobs in November, (well below the 125,000-130,000 estimated by market analysts), while the unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to 10% from October’s 26 year high of 10.2%.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is due to speak tonight in the US and will be listened to even more closely after the surprising jobs figures, which also showed more part-time jobs being created, more hours being worked and a tiny rise in weekly wages. And job losses in September and October were revised down by a total of 159,000, contributing to the surprising strength of the report.

However, there were weak points. About 5.9 million Americans had been out of work for more than 27 weeks last month, representing 38.3% of the total unemployed and the average duration of unemployment touched a record 28.5 weeks. But that is not unexpected towards the end of a deep, nasty recession.

But the interesting move was the sharp rise in the US dollars as the headless chickens went from boom, more boom, to rate rise looms thinking in the twinkling of an email.

So the US dollar rose, the yen fell, as did the Europe and the Aussie dollar. Gold fell 4% in a day, so much for being the great predictor about US inflation, etc. US bond rates jumped. The Fed meets for its final meeting this year next week and its usual post-meeting statement will closely examined for a sign the jobs report has led to a change of thinking. Watch for the phrase about interest rates continuing at their current record lows for an extended period of time.

The dollar posted its biggest gain in nearly five months against the major trading currencies, no wonder, the jobs report was the best for 23 months, since December 2007, when 120,000 jobs were created and the recent recession actually started.

In Australia, Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens gives the dinner speech at tomorrow’s annual forecasting dinner of the Australian Business Economists. With three consecutive rate rises under his belt, the market will be looking for some outline of how the bank sees 2010 (not that it hasn’t already provided a lot of the picture recently).