U.s. Economy | featured news

President Obama said Friday that the job growth reflected in the latest employment report is “not good enough” but suggested things would get better quicker if Congress would cooperate.

The economy added only 96,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department reported this morning; Republicans quickly pounced on the slow job growth, the morning after the Democrats wrapped up their convention in Charlotte.

U.S. employers added 96,000 jobs last month, a weak figure that could slow any momentum President Barack Obama hoped to gain from his speech to the Democratic National Convention. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent in July, but only because more people gave up looking for work. The government only counts people as unemployed if they are actively searching.

President Obama is framing his case for re-election by counseling patience for a stronger economy that still may be years away.

Fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, and a private survey showed businesses stepped up hiring in August. The data sketched a brighter outlook for the job market one day before the government reports on August employment.

Sounding at times like a college lecturer and others like a revival speaker, former President Clinton delivered a thumping endorsement Wednesday night of incumbent Barack Obama, saying his policies were slowly healing the country and would lead to dramatic improvement in a second term.

Why the battle to take credit for Ohio’s ever-so-slightly above-average economy could swing the presidential election...While most of the debate nationally still revolves around why the economy remains so pathetic, there are several pivotal states — Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia — where things are slowly turning around.

Nationwide home prices shot up 3.8% in July, making their largest year-over-year leap since 2006, according to real estate data provider CoreLogic. The gain marks the fifth straight rise in the gauge, part of a positive swing following a year and a half of slumps. The last time prices rose so much was in August 2006, when they jumped 4.1%.

Manufacturing shrank at its sharpest clip in more than three years in August, the third month of contraction in a row, and firms hired the fewest workers since late 2009, a survey on Tuesday showed.

President Obama gives himself a grade of "incomplete" on the economy, citing the difficult circumstances he inherited upon taking office in 2009. "Obviously we are still going through one of the toughest times that we've had in my lifetime," Obama told KKTV of Colorado Springs in an interview aired Monday, but he said his policies are helping turn things around.