Weekly Wrap: Yet another stagnant jobs report
Leigh Gallagher from Fortune Magazine and Cardiff Garcia of the blog FT Alphaville wrap up this week’s biggest business stories.
On the June unemployment report, in which 80,000 jobs were added and the unemployment rate stayed at 8.2 percent:
Leigh Gallagher: It’s certainly not great, but it’s not surprising. You know, this is all not great. The past three months have not been great, this is just more of the same. You can parse it and look at the positives within the number — if you can call them positives — hours worked were up, wage earnings were up. More people entered the job market, which actually can end up sending the unemployment rate up, which we didn’t see. So you know, it again wasn’t so unexpected even if it wasn’t great.
Cardiff Garcia: I thought it was a bad report. Job growth was pretty stagnant across most sectors. As Leigh mentioned, it is the third consecutive pretty bad report. I’d really emphasize that it’s dangerous to just look at one month of the report because if you look at the underlying pace of jobs growth for the last six months, it’s a little better. I think the real message we should take is that things just were not as good as we thought earlier in the year, but neither are they deteriorating quite as badly as I think some will interpret this report to say.
For more analysis, listen to the full audio.
Correction: The text of this story originally included the incorrect number of jobs added in June. The text has been corrected.
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