According to figures released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 114,000 jobs in September. That number is somewhat below the average we've seen for the year, which is 146,000 new jobs per month. Still. the headline unemployment figure dropped relatively sharply, from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent.
Maybe the biggest reason for that was that the jobs figures for recent months got revised upward. August's disappointing number of 96,000 was revised up to 142,000. And July's figure, initially reported at 141,000, was revised to a very solid 181,000. Sometimes the unemployment rate drops because the number of people in the labor force falls, but that wasn't the case this time; the civilian labor force rose by 418,000 in September.
So now we have an unemployment rate below 8 percent for the first time since January of 2009, when it was also at 7.8 percent. The rate had been stuck between 8.1 and 8.3 percent for all of 2012 prior to this latest release.
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