August jobs growth disappoints

Friday’s August jobs report documented another weak step in the long, slow and tepid ongoing economic recovery, with the U.S. economy adding 169,000 jobs and the unemployment rate edging down to 7.3 percent.

Those numbers fell short of economists’ expectations for the month, and other data contained in the release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics hinted that the jobs market remains weaker than the headline numbers suggest. Revisions showed that 74,000 fewer jobs were created in July and June than previously measured.

The labor force participation rate fell slightly, from 63.4 in July to 63.2 percent in August — the lowest rate since 1978 — indicating that the improvement in the unemployment rate over the past few months has been driven largely by Americans leaving the official workforce rather than gaining jobs. The number of people who have been looking for work for more than 27 weeks remained stuck at 4.3 million. The long-term unemployed make up almost 40 percent of all those missing jobs.

With the downward revisions to July and June data, the U.S. economy has averaged just short of a 150,000 gain in seasonally adjusted non-farm payrolls for the past three months. At that rate of job growth, the economy would not return to a pre-recession level of employment and a pre-recession rate of labor force participation until after 2025, as projected by the Hamilton Project’s jobs calculator. At the average rate of jobs growth for the past year — nearly 184,000 — the jobs gap would not be closed for nearly nine years.


http://washingtonexaminer.com/august-jobs-growth-disappoints/article/2535281

Funny how differently you and I read this report than NB. NB thinks the economy is doing wonderful, every new job report is wonderful to him. It's also funny how ever single month gets changed a month or two later, usually for the worse.