January 4th, 2008
No Silver Lining in Employment Report
Job Growth Numbers Send Stocks Lower - New York Times
“This is a far weaker report than we expected,” Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economics Policy Institute, wrote in an e-mail message. “The uptick in the unemployment rate alone, which won’t be revised away, is flashing recession.”
I’ve been talking about the weaker trend in employment growth for some time. This report didn’t help at all. The year/year gain in employment was 1.0% on the seasonally adjusted basis I find difficult to trust, and was down 0.6% on a non-seasonally adjusted basis.
