The President: Job Growth is Accelerating; The Fed: Unemployment is Headed Higher

The Baltimore Sun reports:

President Barack Obama said Monday the United States must accelerate job growth, but he said the country was not experiencing a “jobless recovery” as it pulled out of a recession.

We've seen eight months in a row of private sector job growth. We're actually seeing more job growth so far in this recovery than we did in the last recovery that we had back in 2001,” Obama said during an interview on NBC television.

The problem is we just lost so many jobs because of the crisis that we've got a much bigger hole to fill, and that means we're going to have to accelerate job growth and we've got to do everything we can to focus on that.”

WSJ reports:

The strong likelihood of tepid economic growth through next year suggests unemployment may rise, rather than fall, as many forecasters currently predict.

In a paper published Monday, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco warn business cycle analysis generated within the central bank system is pointing to growth that will be “at or below potential” growth levels.

This modest rate of advancement won’t be enough to generate the needed level of job growth, which suggests “the unemployment rate could rise by as much a 0.5 percentage point during this period,” moving from the current level of 9.6% to 10.1%. The paper’s authors, economists David Lang and Kevin Lansing, observe “such a scenario would take the unemployment rate back to the peak recorded in October 2009.”