‘Missed It By That Much, Chief’

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Drew M. at AOSHQ reacts with an old Maxwell Smart line to the “unexpectedly” news about August unemployment, as live-blogged this morning by the Wall Street Journal‘s Mark Gongloff:

The consensus [expectation was] for 70,000 new payroll jobs and a 9.1% unemployment rate. . . .Payrolls were [unchanged]! Zero jobs. Unemployment came in at 9.1%. . . . July payroll revised down to 85,000 from 117,000. Also not good. . . . Average hourly earnings fell 0.1% — that’s not good. Expectations were for an increase of 0.2%. . . . The workweek fell to 34.2 hours from 34.3 hours. That’s a sign of a greater slowdown in activity than economists expected.

(Aside: Live-blogging the release of an economic report? Welcome to the future! ) President Obama has now gained a historic distinction:

The US economy created no jobs and the unemployment rate held steadily higher at 9.1 percent in August, fueling concerns that the US is heading for another recession. It was the first time since World War II that the economy had a net zero jobs created for a month.

It’s official: Jimmy Carter is now the second-worst president in history.

12 comments

  3. Obama is going to win. He’s going to get his base by playing the victim card. He’s going to get the middle by trashing his opponent with help from the media and DC insiders eg Clinton, Pelosi, McCain. The Dems will replace Biden and get the Repubs to impeach and remove Obama.

  4. The country is not “possibly entering a double dip recession”, it is completely into the Obama Depression.  Don’t believe it? Ask anyone who lived through the FDR era.

  5. Interesting point via Rush today: what if our labor pool today was as large as the labor pool in January 2009. The number would be 11.1%.

    GOP should start running on real unemployment numbers: add in the number of folks who’ve fallen off the rolls after 99 weeks; and the number of folks committing crimes so they can get 3-hots-&-a-cot and healthcare from the prison system.

  8. Sad ain’t it that we had to give him the upgrade, but that’s the nature of sequential ranking.  Too bad there wasn’t a way to downgrade [pun intended] Obama and keep Carter where he is [any physicists out there?].

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