Unemployment Up

I said when the quarter two GDP numbers came in showing decent growth that this seemed inconsistent with what we’ve seen from the labor market data. And today comes another data point that certainly looks more like recession than like 3.3 percent growth, as unemployment ticked up to 6.1 percent on the eighth consecutive month of job losses. The country has seem substantially higher unemployment numbers in the past, but overall the rate of job creation during the Bush-era expansion was ridiculously slow and has turned south well before the employment-population ration ever re-achieved its 1990s-era peaks.