Jobs Update

Let's find some bright coins in the mud

   There's some more evidence that the recession trough is ending and the economy is beginning to pick up.
   U.S. employers added 169,000 jobs in August, as the unemployment rate held at 7.3 percent, according to the Labor Department. Also, the number of long-term unemployed held at 4.3 million; this is a drop of 733,000 over the past 12 months, the government agency said. It defines long-term unemployed as being jobless for 27 weeks or more.
   Other data were virtually unchanged from the month before. These included the employment-population ratio, at 58.6 percent, and discouraged workers. The number of those working part-time because full-time work was not available dipped by 334,000.
   So while some nations, such as India and Brazil, are still struggling, the U.S. economy may have finally bottomed out, and efforts to coordinate international economic policy may be gaining. As the meeting of top world leaders ended in Russia, combined words of praise and caution came from the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde.
   "Coordinated action has done much to stabilize the world economy," she said, but "much remains to be done to get the world economy working better."
   The world is changing, Lagarde noted, but "global growth remains subdued," and it will take work from both advanced economies and emerging markets, acting together, to keep things healthy.
   At the summit meeting, the Group of 20 nations voted to monitor more closely practices by multinational corporations that use foreign subsidiaries to avoid taxes.
  Meanwhile, there's a move afoot to crack down on super-large financial institutions, forcing them to increase their reserves and take fewer wild risks, since those banks deemed too big to fail have been a danger to the economy as a whole. Or, as someone once said, "If it's too big to fail, it's too big."