Ken Shepherd of the Business & Media Institute noted that last week, CBS News anchor Katie Couric had a piece on the nightly news that worried about job loss. The next day, the Department of Labor reported that the unemployment rate was at a five-year low.
Shepherd wrote, “‘The Dow was down for the fifth straight session, the longest losing streak of the year,’ a sour Couric relayed to her audience. Looking at ‘a couple of reasons for today’s decline,’ Couric cited unchanged worker productivity coupled with a 3.8 percent jump in wages and benefits in the same time period.
“‘That could add up to jobs in jeopardy,’ Couric worried, as she led into a piece on the struggles of Michigan autoworkers.
Couric spoke too soon. The next morning the federal government released new data that show the lowest unemployment rate in five years and strong job growth over the past few months.
“The November report ‘showed that the civilian unemployment rate fell 0.2 percentage point from 4.6 percent in September’ and ‘marked the third month in a row that the politically prominent jobless rate decline,’ noted Associated Press writer Jeannine Aversa.
“While the October job numbers fell below expectations ‘both August and September turned out to be much stronger than previously estimated,’ Aversa reported.”
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