Sour news on jobs

The early readings on the June employment report are not great. It's actually a tricky report to follow. Payroll jobs fell by 125,000 last month, which is not quite as bad as it might seem because much of the losses are attributable to all those Census jobs that were phased out. Trouble is the private sector didn't do enough to offset the losses. Companies only added 83,000 jobs, a strong indication that the economy slowed down in June. Dig into the report and there are other worrisome developments. Employers cut hours, average pay dropped, and more folks gave up looking for work. Early headlines note that the unemployment rate fell to 9.5 percent, but the broader measure of unemployment, which includes folks who have stopped looking for work or who can't find full-time jobs, is 16.5 percent, down only 0.1 percent from the previous month. Here are posts from the NYT's Dave Leonhardt and the WSJ's Phil Izzo.