By Rob Basso on
9/6/2011 11:52 AM
The jobs report came out last Friday and folks, the news is not great. Zero new jobs were added in August, a rare occurrence in US history. In fact, this is such a rare occurrence that the last time the government reported that zero jobs were created was February of 1945.
The national unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.1%, but what does zero jobs added actually mean? Economists usually estimate that to keep up with population growth, the country needs to add approximately 150,000 jobs each month. To actually grow, we’d need to add about 300,000 jobs a month or more to recover the 8.8 million jobs lost during the recession.
What’s behind these numbers?