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February's numbers turned out to be a bit of a snooze - the U.S. unemployment rate remains unchanged at 9.7 percent and 36,000 payroll jobs were lost. But the last few months show an economy that's going nowhere fast.
--February -36,000 jobs
--January -26,000
--December -109,000 jobs
--Novermer +64,000
--October -224,000
Construction took another hit in February, while manufacturing and retail were mostly unchanged. Meanwhile, a broader measure of unemployment, known as "U-6," was up 0.3 percentage point to 16.8 percent. This measures the number of people who have stopped looking for work or who can't find full-time jobs, a metric some believe is more reflective of the jobs situation than the standard unemployment rate. Here's the BLS release.
Mark Lacter created the LA Biz Observed blog in 2006. He posted
until the day before his death on Nov. 13, 2013.