One day after a dramatic sell-off in the equity markets, the Labor Department announced that 117,000 jobs were created in July. This marks a gain over the last two months and while job creation still remains too muted to reduce unemployment by a meaningful amount, the result is an improvement.
The official unemployment rate fell to 9.1 percent from 9.2 percent but critics argue most of this is due to the number of people that have simply abandoned the search for a job. These people are not counted as being unemployed