Employment Gloom

The June employment report from the BLS showed 8.2% unemployment and the creation of 80,000 jobs during the month. Job creation was even worse than the already low expectation of the consensus view (90,000). To make matters worse, the optimistic crowd that expected April and May to be revised upwards got nothing; revisions to prior months changed the number of jobs created during those two months by only 1,000 jobs which is less than a rounding error. We have been hearing about the beginning of a recovery in housing, but construction jobs were flat. Indeed, there were no good sectors for employment. It was a horrible report whose only saving grace is that it was not worse. Still, to put it in context, we are now 53 months past the start of the last recession and there remain over 3% fewer jobs in total in the USA than there were when that recession began. The last time a jobs recovery was that poor was the Great Depression.

The saddest thing of all is that there are steps that could be taken which would get growth started again. There is no leadership to bring this about, however. President Obama is too focused on his re-election to actually work on helping the economy. He cannot change his policies since to do so would be to admit that they did not work and Obama's argument until now is that none of this was his fault. So we are stuck not only with policies that do no work but with a "leader" who will not admit that they do not work.