Employment Update: August 2012

The dogs bark, but the caravan keeps moving on. Yes. The caravan is the economy, and it has a mind of its own. The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last month’s employment gains of 163,000 jobs down to 122,000. For August it reported a gain of 96,000. But what with that downward revision, the net change for this month was 55,000 in the upward direction. Still no trend. The Democrats will claim that jobs are growing, the Republicans that the job report is a disaster. Sure, sure. Fact is, the dogs don’t move the caravan. It is the camels that do it.

The full detail on the employment change is accessible from the BLS press release (link). The updated chart, reflecting the July down-ward revision, follows. As of August, we had recovered 3.98 million of the 8.66 million jobs lost in 2008 and 2009, 45.9 percent of total. A very slow-moving caravan, this one.