The verdict from President Obama’s economic advisers: Better than nothing, not good enough, likely to get worse.
That assessment of the September jobs report comes from a new blog post from the Council of Economic Advisers, now headed by Jason Furman, a longtime Obama aide. The economy continues to add jobs at a pace of around 130,000 a month, “lower than we can be fully satisfied with,†Mr. Furman writes. The overall pace of job creation has flattened out, and economists generally expect the unemployment rate to continue to drift down only slowly, in part because Americans continue to leave the labor force. Worse, the jobs report for October might show some deterioration, Mr. Furman noted, because of the government shutdown and flirtation with the country’s borrowing ceiling.
Source: Council of Economic Advisers All in all, the report “underscores the continued importance of taking steps that speed the recovery and boost job creation, while avoiding self-inflicted wounds like a government shutdown and debt ceiling brinksmanship that have the opposite effect,†Mr. Furman writes.
You can now get the economic council’s assessment of the jobs report in yet-more-bite-size form as well. Mr. Furman and Betsey Stevenson, a member of the council, have started Twitter accounts in their official capacities. Ms. Stevenson put out several Twitter posts on the report Tuesday morning, noting, for instance, that the unemployment rate has fallen more sharply for women than for men.
And she noted that long-term unemployment is falling, though the proportion of Americans out of a job for more than six months remains at extraordinarily high levels.
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