Ponies, Ponies Everywhere!

BLS:

Nonfarm payroll employment continued to rise in June, and the unemployment rate remained at 5.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Payroll employment increased by 112,000 in June, following larger gains in the prior 3 months.

Well, that's not so good. More to come...

ntodd

[Update: So, about half the jobs that were expected, and about a third of what was promised. A positive number, but less than the previous few months. That explains the rather neutral wording in the snippet I quote above--I've noticed that when the numbers show a positive trend, BLS includes them in the report. Nothing to brag about here.

In other news:

• Participation rate went up from 65.9, where it's been for 4 months, to 66.0. That's down from this time last year (66.5%). Employment-population ration also went up a smidge, and is now the same as it was last year (62.3%).


• People working part-time for economic reasons dropped to its lowest level in 4 months. The figure is also lower than it was last year (4.513M vs 4.615M), but significantly higher than when Bush took office.


• Average duration of unemployment dropped a whopping 0.1 week to 19.9. That's still higher than this time last year.


• The best news is the rate of unemployed, part-timers, and marginally-attached workers dropped from 9.9% to 9.6%, which is substantially lower than last year (but higher than in 2001).


• Unfortunately, weekly wages dropped $2.45.

Sorry, but there's not a lot of ponies here. This doesn't bode well for our recovery, and it doesn't look all that good for Bush politically.]

['nother update: I was just looking at last month's report, which said employment rose 248k in May. Another reason the BLS was vague in today's report (i.e., "following larger gains in the prior 3 months") is probably because May looks like it was revised down to 235k. April was down from 346k to 324k. March was unchanged.

I'm guessing they didn't want to crow about the incredible shrinking job growth.]

[One last update: Headlines:

• MSGOP - Slow jobs growth. Look inside and the hed is U.S. payrolls grow less than expected.


• CNN - June jobless rate unchanged; growth lags. Look inside and the hed is Jobs growth disappoints.


• Faux News - Breaking News: Unemployment Rate Steady; Payrolls Grow by 112,000. Look inside and the hed is Unemployment Steady, but Job Growth Slow.

Poor Fox. For some reason they didn't point out that we need on average between 150-250k jobs just to tread water. Well, they did mention the labor force grew by 305k, but they used that to spin why the unemployment rate stayed the same, as opposed to pointing out that we're not creating enough jobs...]