151K Jobs Added in October

The U.S. economy added 151,000 jobs in October, reversing the trend for the last four months. Private companies added 159,000 jobs, while the government cut 8,000. Job losses for August and September were also revised to be much lower than previously thought: 1,000 jobs were lost in August as opposed to 57,000, and 41,000 were lost in September instead of 95,000. Still, with 14.8 million people unemployed, the new jobs were insufficient to change the unemployment rate from 9.6 percent. The broad measure of unemployment, which includes underemployed workers and people who have given up looking for work, did go down slightly, to 17 percent from 17.1 percent in September. The Federal Reserve announced new stimulus measures on Wednesday, citing “disappointingly slow” growth.