Bad news in terms of job growth in May. The Labor Department reported employers only created 69,000 jobs last month. Economists had been expecting payrolls in the range of 150,000. This is the smallest job growth number since May of last year. This, compounded with a rise in the unemployment rate from 8.1 to 8.2 percent. This was mostly caused by more people flooding into the labor market, including new graduates and other unemployed who started looking for work again.There could be many factors contributing to this slow down in job growth. Europe’s financial crisis and the slowing Chinese economy all could be factors. The one staggering statistic though shows that there still needs to be a lot of growth to bring the country back to pre-recession levels. American employment is still 5 million jobs short of where it was back in December 2007.
