Oklahoma City a great place to wait out recession

Oklahoma City was a good place to be the past two years for anyone looking to wait out the recession. So were Minneapolis, Minn., and Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y.

Oklahoma's capital had an unemployment rate of 6.7% in January, the lowest among large metro areas. During the recession, its unemployment rate has risen only 2.9 percentage points, making it one of four large metro areas in the country with the smallest increases in joblessness over the past two years.

The national unemployment rate is 9.7%, up nearly 5 percentage points in the past two years with 8.4 million jobs cut -- the most in any downturn since the 1930s.