The new jobs report is out. The unemployment rate climbed to 9.6 percent in August.
Private-sector employers added only 67,000 workers to the payroll.
The black unemployment rate is 16.3 percent, up from 15.6 percent.
The unemployment rate for black men is 17.3 percent, up from 16.7 percent in July.
For black women, the unemployment rate rose to 13.2 percent, from 12.9 percent.
The black youth unemployment rate is a whopping 45.4 percent.
The jobless numbers show President Barack Obama’s “summer of recovery” has yet to begin.
Still, Christina Romer, the outgoing chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, writes:
Today’s employment report was better than expected. Private sector payrolls increased by 67,000 in August—the eighth consecutive month of private sector job growth. This growth is consistent with other recent data reports indicating that the economy is continuing to recover, albeit at a somewhat slower pace than in the early spring. The rate of job growth, however, is not as large as needed to bring the unemployment rate down quickly. Indeed, the unemployment rate rose one -- tenth of a percentage point to 9.6%, as more than half a million people joined the labor force. The President continues to work with his economic team and with Congress to identify measures that could help speed the recovery and put the economy on a path of steadily declining unemployment.
This Labor Day, millions of Americans are looking for signs that the economy is “coming back.”
They now must hope for a “better than expected” Indian summer of recovery.
