How shockingly 'unexpected'.
Not even a day after President Obama's top economic advisor, Christina Romer, announced her resignation, the US Labor Department reported that the economy had shed 131,000 jobs in July.
Romer's resignation comes barely a week after White House budget director Peter Orszag stepped down. Romer, an economics professor at Cal Berkley before her appointment, will step down in early September.
Economists polled by Dow-Jones Newswires were expecting losses in the neighborhood of 60,000- less than half of today's numbers. The total number of government jobs lost last month was 202,000, with many of those being US Census workers who's field work wrapped up in Early July, along with an estimated 48,000 state and local government jobs.
Contrast the numbers with a modest 71,000 private sector jobs created last month and one gets the impression that we were never in a 'recovery' to begin with, let alone the notion that this fictitious recovery was slowing down.
The overall unemployment rate remained steady at 9.5% nationwide [h/t the Washington Post for the super-detailed interactive map].
We only lost 131k jobs? That sounds like good news.
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