By DPA,
Washington: The US unemployment rate has remained stuck at 9.6 percent for the third consecutive month, according to government data released Friday, reflecting a stagnant US economy and bringing more bad news for President Barack Obama.
The US Department of Labor said 14.8 million Americans remained jobless for the month of October.
The addition of 151,000 jobs during the month with gains in mining and health care was partially offset by losses in other areas, such as local government, the department said.
Job growth in manufacturing remained flat, as it has since May, the department said.
The slow pace of the economic recovery and high unemployment rate helped boost Republicans in Tuesday’s congressional elections.
In a major blow to Obama and the Democrats, Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate.
The US Federal Reserve Wednesday introduced one of its last tools in an effort to stimulate growth, announcing that it would print more money to buy up $600-billion-worth of long-term government debt. It hopes the move will further lower interest rates and drive investors back into spending in the private sector.
“We have a deep hole to dig out of,” Nigel Gault, chief US economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts, told Bloomberg news. “It’ll be years before we get back to where we started.”
In a post-election press conference, Obama acknowledged that there was a great deal of voter frustration over the state of the economy.
Though he insisted that his policies had prevented a complete collapse of the economy, he pledged to work with Republicans to get it back on track.
The Fed’s new purchase of long-term Treasury securities will be completed by the end of June 2011 at a rate of about $75 billion per month. The “pace” and “overall size” could be tweaked over the coming months as the Fed evaluates economic growth.
It marks the US central bank’s first monetary intervention in the economy since an unprecedented buy-up of nearly $2 trillion in Treasury debt and mortgage securities in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when the recession was peaking.
“The pace of recovery in output and employment continues to be slow,” the Federal Reserve said Wednesday. “Employers remain reluctant to add to payrolls.”
The US economy grew just two percent in the third quarter of this year and 1.7 percent in the April-June period.