(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
BY TRACY PFEIFFER
ANCHOR MEGAN MURPHY
You're watching multisoure business video news analysis from Newsy.
After global stock markets took a massive tumble Thursday, sending investors scrambling -- the world waited anxiously for the United States’ July jobs report Friday morning. A bad number -- they said -- could be catastrophic.
But luckily...
ANCHOR, KPIX: “The nation’s unemployment rate fell slightly last month to 9.1 percent. The economy created 117,000 new jobs. Both numbers are better than what economists expected.”
Many analysts were predicting a job growth of only 75,000 -- so it’s good news.
And it’s not just good news from July.
ALI VELSHI, CNN: “This always happens, every month, we get a revision to the two prior months because there’s more data, it’s more accurate. And here’s what we found. In June, we thought we had gained just 18,000 jobs. That was very, very week. We now learned that we gained 46,000 jobs in June. ... Back in May we thought we’d increased about 25,000, turns out we gained 53,000. ... It probably buys us a little bit of breathing room.”
But many analysts caution against getting too comfy with the numbers. Experts say the United States should be gaining about 125,000 jobs a month to keep pace with population growth.
Leo Hindery, founder of private equity firm InterMedia Partners, tells Bloomberg-- it’s kind of a consolation prize.
LEO HINDERY, INTERMEDIA PARTNERS: “This is a better jobs number than we expected, but we expected a very poor one, so this is slightly less poor. Where is the confidence? So as a CEO, I’ve never hired a woman or man based on a tax credit, I’ve never hired them based on sort of repatriated earnings, I do it when I’m confident that my business is going to grow. And ninety plus percent of the U.S. economy on the industrial side is consumer confidence.”
So is the jobs number enough to prevent the United States from slipping into the dreaded double-dip recession? Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi tells MSNBC -- maybe.
MARK ZANDI, MOODY’S: “Obviously, the economy is really struggling, you can’t discount the possibility. ... People are just shell-shocked, and if anything goes slightly off-track, European debt problem for example, the bickering in Washington. It just unnerves people and they freeze. ... We need to get a break here, and hopefully policymakers make a few good steps here, both here in the U.S. and in Europe and I think confidence will re-establish itself.”
Finally -- CNBC’s Jim Cramer says, while the jobs report is a bit of a relief, it alone won’t be enough to calm investor anxieties.
JIM CRAMER, CNBC: “I can’t jump up and down for joy because we’re not the fulcrum. The fulcrum is Italy and Spain, so we have to look at their GDP and their hiring ‘cause that is equal to what’s going on here, if only because there’s so much money that’s pegged to Europe.”
MELISSA LEE, CNBC: “So temporary sigh of relief.”
CRAMER: “Yes.”
Reports indicate the futures rose in response to the jobs report -- but stick with Newsy for more developments on the United States and world economies.
Transcript by Newsy.
