Unemployment Drops to 9% in January

Here’s a rather strange-sounding jobs report: The jobless rate dropped from 9.4% in December to 9% in January, yet the economy only created 50,000 jobs last month. The private sector added 50,000 jobs and the public sector shed 14,000.

The reason for the big decline in the rate is that fewer people are looking for jobs. Economists are also blaming the snow which sounds like a pretty lame excuse. The construction sector lost 32,000 jobs in January.

If that’s not bad enough, the government did its benchmark revisions this past month, so the numbers for 2010 were even worse than we originally expected.

Posted by on February 4th, 2011 at 9:05 am


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