Mr. Obama Gets a Day Late Birthday Present in Unemployment Numbers

It’s a Temporary Reprieve Mr. Obama, Not a Cure

Thursday was Mr. Obama’s fiftieth birthday, and a day later he got a nice birthday present when the July jobs numbers were released.  Employment in July rose 110,000 and the unemployment rate was down by .1% from 9.2% to 9.1%.  Mr. Obama should have breathed a deep sign of relief at the numbers, had they shown no growth in jobs and higher unemployment they would have generated a storm of criticism of his economic stewardship of the country.

The jobs report is the just first of the economic reports that come every month, and  The Dismal Political Economist has pointed out before that one month’s data is not enough to draw any major conclusions.  In fact, the low May jobs growth has been revised upward.  Also, the report indicated that the loss of jobs in the public sector was largely due to the government shutdown in Minnesota and that those jobs should be coming back.  Private sector hiring contnues to look, well, not bad



So what we have is a big increase in jobs in April, weak job creation in May and June and moderate job creation in July.  Together this indicates the economy is “stalled out”, neither growing nor contracting.

That is not good long term news, but for the short term Mr. Obama can relax for a few days, one day until, of course, the next set of bad economic news is released.

Which of course, took about one day.  S&P lowered the U. S. credit rating from AAA.

This has little impact on debt markets, but a huge impact in politics.  Look for the ads saying that Obama caused the U. S. credit rating to drop.  Those ads should be starting, right about now.