U.s. Economy | featured news

When conspiracists suggested Friday that the Obama administration had engineered a sharp drop in unemployment to aid President Barack Obama's re-election, the response was swift. Career government officials, economists and even some Mitt Romney supporters issued a collective sigh. The staffers who compute the U.S. unemployment rate work in an agency of the Labor Department. Officials who have overseen the work say it's prepared under tight security with no White House input or supervision.

For Mitt Romney, it was the number that proved everything. Since the very first speech of his campaign, the Republican candidate has used a simple figure to bolster his argument that President Obama couldn’t fix the U.S. economy: 8 percent.

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits rose slightly in the latest week, indicating a labor market that remains in the doldrums. The Labor Department reported that new claims rose a seasonally-adjusted 4,000 to 367,000, while the four-week moving average, considered a more accurate gauge of labor market conditions, was flat at 375,000.

The euro zone's economic woes accelerated last month and China's slowdown looked likely to extend to a seventh quarter, surveys on Wednesday showed, while the United States proved the bright spot with better-than-expected news on services and jobs.

U.S. births fell for the fourth year in a row, the government reported Wednesday, with experts calling it more proof that the weak economy has continued to dampen enthusiasm for having children.

The pace of growth in the vast U.S. services sector picked up in September as new orders accelerated, though employment cooled, an industry report showed on Wednesday.

Companies added 162,000 jobs in September, more than economists expected but still pointing to slow improvement in the labor market, data from a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

Are you better off now than four years ago? If you live in one of the key swing states, chances are the answer is "yes." And that could prove to be a difference maker in the competitive race for the White House.

Chairman Ben Bernanke offered a wide-ranging defense Monday of the Federal Reserve's aggressive policies to stimulate the still-weak economy. The Fed needs to drive down long-term borrowing rates because the economy isn't growing fast enough to reduce high unemployment, Bernanke said in a speech to the Economic Club of Indiana. The unemployment rate is 8.1 percent.

Stocks got a boost on Wall Street from positive economic news on Monday. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 135 points to 13,572 in the first hour of trading. The market was already higher in the opening minutes of trading, then jumped at 10 a.m. after the Institute for Supply Management reported that U.S. manufacturing grew in September for the first time in four months.