MORE BAD NEWS FOR OBAMA, UNEMPLOYMENT RATE EXPECTED TO RISE

By GEOFF HOLTZMAN
Talk Radio News Service

WASHINGTON - Former Federal Reserve adviser Stephen Oliner said Thursday that he thinks the nation’s unemployment rate will inch upward when the August jobs numbers are released Friday morning.

“I expect the report to show that the labor market remained sluggish in September, with an increase in nonfarm payrolls of only about 100,000 and an uptick in the unemployment rate to 8.2 percent,” he said. “Nothing in the report should deter the Fed from continuing with its aggressive policy easing.”

Oliner is an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a research center based in Washington, D.C.

Former Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Keith Hall seemed to agree with Oliner’s forecast.

“We’ve been getting around 95,000 new jobs per month and there is no reason to think that this report will be largely different,” Hall told TRNS. “I think somewhere between 95k and 120k new jobs is likely. I don’t expect the unemployment rate to change unless we get another jump in people dropping out of the labor force. This could happen since the labor force has fallen by half a million people over the past two months. If this happens, we could get a tick down in the unemployment rate.”

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Posted by Gary on Oct 4 2012. Filed under Breaking News, Economy/Business/Labor, Politics, US. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.