Government reports 157,000 new jobs and 7.9% unemployment rate. Previous months revised sharply up

Today's Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement of a seasonally adjusted 157,000 new jobs created in January is a far cry from the comparable report for 2009. Four years ago, before Barack Obama had been behind the big desk in the Oval Office for a full three weeks, the BLS released a brutal report. The seasonally adjusted loss then was 818,000 jobs, the worst loss since October 1949 and the fourth worst since the government started publishing monthly statistics in 1939.

By the time that report landed on Obama's desk, the BLS had already counted 3.6 million lost jobs over the previous 12 months. And the hemorrhaging did not stop for another year. By then the Great Recession had, in 25 months, carved 8.8 million jobs out of the economy, forced millions of Americans from full-time work into part-time jobs and pushed millions of others to abandon the labor force altogether. Officially, the unemployment rate rose to 10 percent, but that didn't come close to measuring the extent of the damage.

We are still far from having recovered from the recession's devastating effects. But this morning's BLS report marks the 28th month in which more jobs were gained than lost, a total of 4.6 million since President Obama took office. With their adamant opposition to economic stimulus other than tax cuts, that's far more jobs than would have been the case if Republicans had been in charge. And far fewer than would be the case if a truly adequate stimulus plan with New Deal-style programs had been pushed past GOP congressional blockades.

For January, the private sector expanded by 166,000 jobs. Governments at all levels lost 9,000 jobs, for that net gain of 157,000. The official unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent. The consensus of experts surveyed by Bloomberg in the week before the announcement had predicted 185,000 new jobs and an unemployment rate of 7.7 percent.

The bureau sharply revised its previously reported growth in payroll employment for November from 161,000 to 247,000 and for December from 155,000 to 196,000. It counted 12.3 million Americans as officially unemployed. The number of Americans unemployed for six months or more fell to 4.7 million. The civilian labor force participation ratio remained steady at 63.6 percent; the employment-population ratio also held at 58.6 percent.

BLS also measures the job situation with an alternative gauge (called U6) that counts part-time workers who want full-time jobs and some but not all Americans who want jobs but have stopping looking for one. The U6 rate remained at 14.4 percent, the same as it has been since November.

(For more details about today's jobs report, please continue reading ...)