Unemployment Climbs to 9.6%

243K jobs were added in January: jobs report

(NEWSER) - The unemployment rate had been expected to hold steady at 8.5%, with just 125,000 jobs added—instead, unemployment fell to 8.3% and 243,000 jobs were added last month, according to January's better-than-expected jobs report. The report has Wall Street Journal bloggers particularly effusive: "America's back, baby. America's back." Stock futures are also up on the news, the Journal notes. More»

Fed says inflation on target, but unemployment high, growth sluggish

(NEWSER) - Don't get too excited about that pending economic rebound . The Federal Reserve's announcement it will keep interest rates super-low into 2014 is a key sign that the US economy is years away from truly recovering, reports the New York Times . Yes, the economy has picked up "moderately," said the Fed in a statement, but jobs are still scarce and growth is expected to be sluggish for the foreseeable future—2.7% in 2012, 3.2% in 2013, and perhaps as high as 4% in 2014. “What did we learn today? Things are bad, and they’re not improving at the rate that they want them to improve,” said the chief US economist at HSBC. More»

200K jobs added in December: jobs report

(NEWSER) - A better-than-expected jobs report shows that 2011 ended with a bang: The unemployment rate fell to 8.5% last month, the lowest since February 2009, and 200,000 new jobs were added, the Wall Street Journal reports. The jobs report was expected to be solid, but not this solid: Unemployment had been expected to rise from 8.6% to 8.7%, and 150,000 new jobs were forecasted, according to the AP . More good news: October's jobs were revised upward by 12,000, but November's were revised downward by around 2,000. More»

Liberal arts grads aren't faring much better

(NEWSER) - Students majoring in the liberal arts or architecture may want to rethink their degree choices in light of the job market. Recent college grads armed with those academic credentials experienced higher rates of unemployment, a new study out of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce shows. From the Washington Post :

• Worst degrees/jobless rates: Architecture (13.9%), the arts (11.1%), and the humanities (9.4%)
• Best: Health (5.4%), education (5.4%), and agriculture and natural resources (7%)

Nation hiring as rest of eurozone firing

(NEWSER) - While much of the rest of the eurozone struggles with soaring unemployment, Germany's unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest level since it reunified more than 20 years ago. The rate fell to 6.8% in December, helped by strong exports to China and unseasonably warm weather, which allowed construction companies to keep working, the BBC reports. More»