With all the turmoil in the economy last week - the last-minute debt deal, a miserable week for stocks that saw gains for only nine issues in the entire S&P 500, the downgrade of America's debt by Standard & Poor's - we did have a bit of good news on Friday. The economy added 117,000 jobs in July, which was up sharply from the 46,000 we saw in June. Bloomberg News' survey of economists had forecast a consensus of just 85,000 jobs added, so we beat that number too.
The breakdown includes 154,000 private-sector jobs, or substantially up from the 114,000 figure we saw from ADP earlier in the week. Meanwhile, the public sector collectively shed 37,000 jobs in July.
There is a caveat to this, though: Much of the decrease in the unemployment rate can be attributed to the number of discouraged workers leaving the labor force. There are now more than a million people who are not working but have given up looking for work. Less than 58 percent of the American population is now working - the lowest that number has been since 1983.
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