July Jobs Report

The Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy created 163,000 new jobs last month; 172,000 were in the private sector. The unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3%. Working out the decimals, the unemployment rate rose from 8.217% in June to 8.254% in July. The increase was very small, but it rounds up to a 0.1% increase.

Non-farm payrolls rose by 0.12% last month. Over the last 11.5 years, NFP is up by 0.6%. There are now 101.1 million Americans either unemployed or not in the work force (that’s of the civilian non-institutional population over the age of 16). That’s an all-time record.

Since NFP bottomed in February 2010, it has increased by 4,001,000. That’s still less than half the number of jobs that were lost. To match the jobs-to-population ratio from April 2000, we’d need either 15.3 million more jobs or 23.7 million fewer people.

Posted by on August 3rd, 2012 at 8:30 am


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