Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"You can talk about, really, there being two parts to the recession, a production part and a labor part. I think what Bernanke meant was that the production part seems to be over. We've had good news, for example, on factory output, which is up. Home building is up. Inventories are down in businesses. So this means the production part is starting to get some legs, and indeed, this quarter - in the fall - we expect production overall in the economy to be up. But the labor part is another story. We're still losing jobs. In fact, in August in North Carolina, the broadest measure of the labor market showed we still lost another 8,000 jobs. So I think what's happening here is we're getting the production section perhaps going better, the employment section is lagging, and that employment section probably won't be better until sometime next year. And I think where Bernanke could have done himself a favor here is by stressing that, because most people get their news and their feelings about the economy in the job market. And certainly the job market is not well."