WASHINGTON (CBSMiami) – After a day that saw Wall Street hit record highs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics threw some cold water on the nation’s economy with an average unemployment report for the month of July.
Overall, 162,000 jobs were created in July, below analysts’ expectations. The unemployment rate did drop to 7.4 percent, the lowest it’s been since 2008, but much of the decline was due to workers dropping out of the labor force.
Over the last year, the unemployment rate has declined by 0.8 percent, according to the BLS.
But the more discouraging part of the report came in revisions to previous unemployment reports. May’s job creation numbers were revised down from 195,000 to 176,000 and June’s numbers were taken down from 195,000 to 188,000; a total decline of 26,000 jobs that weren’t created.
The takeaway from the numbers is that while the economy continues to create jobs, it’s a stagnated creation process that’s not showing a big boom, but also not showing large declines.
Complicating matters for job seekers is Congressional Republicans not being willing to let any extra spending help spur the markets, in a Keynesian sort of way. Instead, more austerity is being called for, despite the academic research behind austerity being a fraud.
The closely watched U-6 numbers, which is total unemployed plus underemployed, the discouraged, etc, fell to 14 percent in July. Over the last year, the U-6 number has dropped nearly one percent.
