Jobless recovery

Jobless FiguresShow Recovery, Bush Asserts

By Tom Redburn

Published: October 5, 1991

Despite fresh evidence of a weak U.S. economy that produced only a few new jobs in September, President George Bush said Friday that a small drop in unemployment, to 6.7 percent last month, supported his contention that the economic recovery remains on track.

Mr. Bush, faced with the political embarrassment of vetoing a Democratic bill to extend jobless benefits for those thrown out of work by a recession that drove the unemployment rate up to 7 percent last summer, chose to emphasize the positive over the negative at a White House news conference.

"Today's unemployment figures show the economy is moving in the right direction," he said. "I think the economy is recovering. I think it will be more robust as we go along here."

The weak performance of the jobs market came as a shock to Wall Street, which had been expecting employment to pick up in response to signs that the economy may be emerging from its three-year downturn. 

With Democrat challengers growing increasingly optimistic about a challenge for the presidency next year, figures from the department of labour revealed that payrolls fell by almost 100,000 in August - the seventh consecutive monthly fall. 

George Bush's growing vulnerability to the performance of the US economy was highlighted yesterday when government unemployment data showed America in the grips of a jobless recovery last month.

Stronger manufacturing order books and robust consumer spending had left analysts confident that the US would start to generate more employment. But they warned that the haemorrhaging of jobs in the US coupled with the security crisis in post-conflict Iraq raised the possibility that Mr Bush would face the same electoral problems as his father, who lost control of the White House in 1992 despite victory in the first Gulf war. 

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