Today's report on jobs creation for December 2010 is out and the numbers are not particularly good. While Wednesday's report from ADP declaring that there were 297K new jobs in the private sector in December (discussed in yesterday's post here), today's report says there were a net new jobs of 103K for December with the "official" unemployment rate falling to 9.4% and the Un and Underemployed number at 16.7% (Table A-15 here). Of course, the economists were surprised at the figures reported.
Here's the NY Times on the jobs report:
Federal, state and local governments continued to shed jobs — cutting another 10,000 last month after trimming 8,000 in November, revised from 11,000 mostly on the local level. States and municipalities dealing with tighter budgets may be faced with further cuts as they try to shrink their deficits.
While the overall picture showed improving job growth, the additions in the private sector in December were not enough to significantly reduce the ranks of the unemployed or keep pace with people entering the work force. The outlook remains bleak for many workers. More than 14.5 million people were out of work in December.
Still, economists noted that the jobs data is a lagging indicator and pointed to other signs of a turnaround, though their outlook for 2011 remained varied.
