More Bad News On Job Front

The Labor Department has just released its June unemployment and jobs data, and it is dismal. The June unemployment rate has just ticked up to 9.2% from 9.1% in May and the payrolls creation was a mere 18,000. Read more here..

Consensus estimates were 9.1% for unemployment and the payrolls projections were above 100,000 since the ADP payrolls data came out this week.  Dow Jones was at 125,000 in payrolls, and Bloomberg’s reading yesterday was 110,000.  Apparently this leaves more than 14 million Americans on the sidelines.

To make matters worse, the payrolls data for the prior two months were revised lower by 44,000.

One way of looking at matters is to note that we haven't had this few jobs, as a percentage of people, since about 1983, which was a rough year.