The percentage of able-bodied Americans searching for jobs has hit a 30-year-low, and Wall Street now expects the US Federal Reserve to announce a new round of quantitative easing as early as next week.
The US Labor Department released their workforce statistics for August 2012 on Friday, and the figures are far from what economists had expected.
The Labor Department announced this week that while the unemployment rate last month dropped slightly to 8.1 percent, July’s figure was revised to show that fewer jobs, in fact, were added that month. For August, the US economy added 96,000 new jobs, a substantially smaller figure than predicted. The median statistic that Bloomberg found after surveying nearly 100 economists came to 130,000 new jobs.
Additionally, the participation rate — the labor force as a percent of the population as a whole — charted at 63.5 percent, the lowest figure the country has seen since September 1981.
House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner was quick to come down on the Obama White House over the latest news, releasing a statement on Friday that attacks US President Barack Obama and his “failed promises to get our economy moving again.”
“Wages are stagnant, gas prices and health care costs are up, our national debt has surpassed $16 trillion and millions of Americans remain out of work or underemployed,” Speaker Boehner said, only hours after President Obama accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination to run for reelection.
