New unemployment figures showing the United States surprisingly lost just 11,000 jobs in November showed the stricken economy was 'moving in the right direction,' the White House said on Friday. 'I think that the numbers today show that we continue to make much needed progress in getting this economy going again and in getting the right trend going in hiring,' White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said. He noted that the Labor department figures were the best assessment of the job picture that had been released in 22 months, but cautioned that the fight against 10 percent unemployment would remain tough. 'We are clearly moving in the right direction, the recovery act got economic growth going again and now we see positive movement in jobs,' he said, refering to Obama's 787 billion dollar economic stimulus package. 'There will be bumps along the way, there will be ups and downs in the process.' Christina Romer, the chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic advisors, adopted the same tone of controlled optimism, noting that jobs figures were 'volatile and subject to substantial revision.' 'It is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative,' she said in a statement. Seeking to show he cares about economic blight, and to drum up momentum for a jobs creation effort, Obama headed to Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Friday on the first leg of a tour of regions battered hard by the recession. On Thursday, Obama convened a jobs summit with top business executives, economists and labor leaders at the White House, warning that the private sector would have to be in the vanguard of a new job creation effort. Obama will also make a major speech on the economy on Tuesday at the Brookings Institution in Washington containing new measures to boost job creation. The figures, released Friday morning, showed the US unemployment rate easing to 10.0 percent from 10.2 percent in October. The Labor Department jobs figures showed massive improvement from October, when figures showed 111,000 jobs were lost, though that figure was revised down Friday from 190,000. The report, which comes a day after President Barack Obama hosted a 'jobs summit,' was far better than analyst expectations of a loss of 125,000 jobs and an unchanged jobless rate. 