EconomicCrisis.US

The U.S. economy added no jobs in August, the U.S. Labor Department announced Friday — well below the Bloomberg consensus estimate of a 60,000 job gain.

Almost as bad, job gains for the previous two months were revised lower: July, to 85,000 from 117,000; and June to 20,000 from 46,000.

Meanwhile, the nation’s unemployment rate remained the same: at an eyesore level of 9.1 percent.

The very poor jobs report will increase concern that the U.S. economy is growing at a stall speed and not creating anywhere near enough jobs to meet the needs of all Americans looking for work.
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Central bank chief Ben Bernanke once criticized Japan for dithering with its economic crisis. Now he tells the world he needs time to think.

U.S. employment data due on Friday could make the clock tick very loudly for the Federal Reserve chairman.

Bernanke disappointed some financial market participants last week when he declined to give details on how the Fed could lift a U.S. economy moving ahead at stall speed.

Most economists expected his widely anticipated speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, would at least give a tour of his monetary toolkit.
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The Federal Reserved reached into public funds — about $1.2 trillion — to help bail out banks during the 2008 financial crisis, a new report reveals.

A Freedom of Information Act request put together by Bloomberg has allowed for the hard numbers to finally be made available to the public about the loans the Fed dished out to keep financial firms afloat in the midst of an economic collapse.

The Federal Reserve has refrained from disclosing info on the loans, which began in August 2007, and as one economics professor told Bloomberg, “was supposed to be secret and never revealed.” The Fed argued in court for two years that revealing the names and terms of borrowers and their loans would damage stocks, and some of the biggest banks involved asked the US Supreme Court last year to withhold some of the information. The Fed attested that revealing the secretive loans to the public, or even being disclosed to the Government Accountability Office, would expose the weakness of the American economy. Nonetheless, their appeal was declined and data released, at nearly 30,000 pages, shows 21,000 transactions occurring over the course of three years.
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Actually, the news from the AP’s survey of economists isn’t quite as pessimistic as JP Morgan’s long-term predictions earlier this month. The global financier’s projections showed a US growth rate for 2011 of just 1.5% and 1.3% in 2012, with unemployment increasing to 9.5%. AP’s survey predicts something closer to the mid-2s for the next two quarters and all of next year, with weak consumer spending being the main problem:

— The likelihood of a recession within the next 12 months is 26 percent. In June, the economists had put the likelihood at 15 percent.
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