US President Barack Obama said on Thursday he was confident the US economy would recover, despite new data showing unemployment at a 26-year-high of 9.5 percent, which dampened hopes of a quick rebound.
Obama said the latest jobless figures, which showed the economy shedding 467,000 jobs last month, were “sobering” but insisted there were signs that the recession was slowing after the worst slump since the 1930s Great Depression.
“As I’ve said from the moment I walked into the door of this White House, it took years for us to get into this mess and will take us more than a few months to turn this around,” Obama said.
PHOTO: AFP
The president spoke after meeting a group of CEOs of what he described as the “most innovative energy companies in America” to talk about a sector he says is vital to hauling the country out of its deepest recession in decades.
“I’m absolutely confident that we can, at this period of difficulty, prove, once again, what this nation can achieve when challenged,” Obama said.
“I’m confident that we’re not only going to recover from this recession in the short term, but we’re going to prosper in the long term,” he said.
The Labor Department report, seen as one of the best indicators of economic momentum, reversed the improvement seen last month when job losses fell to a revised 322,000.
Since the recession began in December 2007, the world’s biggest economy has lost 6.5 million jobs and the jobless rate has risen 4.6 percentage points.
Obama said last month that unemployment may rise above 10 percent before the economy stabilizes.
Taking office in the grip of economic blight at the end of January, Obama quickly passed a US$787 billion economic stimulus bill and has presided over sweeping banking, mortgage and regulatory reform.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Thursday denied that the figures showed the stimulus plan was not working.
“There is a sense that the beginnings of stabilization are taking hold,” he said, adding that “there’s obviously evidence that the recovery plan is working.”
Senior White House officials have argued that the jobless picture would be even worse were it not for the job-creating impact of the stimulus plan.
With the economy still bleeding jobs, some analysts fear a new downward spiral fed by falling incomes that cut into consumer spending, the lifeblood of economic activity.
Meny Grauman, an economist at CIBC World Markets, said that some analysts had gotten ahead of themselves in anticipating an economic recovery.
The payrolls report last month “shows the recession lives on in the United States,” he said.
“It’s a question of the pace of decline and not recovery. The economy continues to contract at a slower pace than at the beginning of this year, but it’s still a steep ride,” he said.
Many analysts expect the third quarter that began on July 1 to show flat or improving economic activity as a recovery takes hold, but the latest labor report is raising doubts.
“I have always argued that one month a trend does not make and that is the case with this data. But the employment reductions have to slow soon if the economy is to start to rebound,” Joel Naroff at Naroff Economic Advisers said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS