L.A. firm accused of stealing millions from investors shut down

The Securities and Exchange Commission has obtained an emergency court order shutting down a Los Angeles company that claimed to invest in life insurance policies, but instead allegedly used investor money to finance the owner’s luxury lifestyle.

The SEC accused Daniel C.S. Powell and his company, Christian Stanley Inc., of defrauding investors by making false claims that it invested in so-called life settlements. Powell raised at least $4.5 million from at least 50 investors nationwide but never used the money to buy life insurance policies as he said would, the SEC said. Instead, he spent the money on luxury hotels, expensive cars and visits to nightclubs and restaurants, the SEC said.

At the request of the SEC, U.S. District Judge George H. King issued a temporary restraining order freezing the assets of the company and placing a receiver in charge of the company’s assets. Powell could not be reached for comment.

Life settlements are transactions in which policy holders sell life insurance policies to third parties.

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-- Stuart Pfeifer

Photo: The Securities and Exchange Commission. Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters 

Long-term interest rates plunge on hopes for new Fed stimulus [Updated]

Long-term Treasury bond yields tumbled Friday as investors bet that the grim employment picture will force the Federal Reserve to launch a new bond-buying economic stimulus program.

The 10-year T-note yield, a benchmark for mortgages and other long-term interest rates, plunged to 2.01% by about 11:40 a.m. PDT, down from 2.13% on Thursday.

If the yield closes at current levels it will mark a new generational low, falling below the previous low of 2.06% reached in mid-August. [Updated at 2:40 p.m.: The 10-year yield ended at 1.99%, the lowest since at least 1950.]

Shorter-term Treasury yields, however, were slightly higher. The two-year T-note edged up to 0.20% from 0.18% on Thursday.

The reason for the split performance: With short-term rates already near zero, Wall Street now expects the Fed to launch a Treasury-bond-buying program specifically aimed at pulling down longer-term interest rates.

The Fed tried a similar program in the early 1960s. It was dubbed “Operation Twist” because the goal was to twist the so-called yield curve, bringing longer-term rates down while holding shorter-term rates steady or allowing them to rise modestly.

Rather than print new money to finance purchases of longer-term bonds, the Fed could sell some of its shorter-term Treasury holdings and reinvest the proceeds in longer-term issues, such as the 10-year T-note. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke has hinted in recent months that the central bank could turn to that option if the economy needed more help. The Fed owns $2.6 trillion in Treasury and mortgage securities in all.

The next Fed stimulus plan “would most likely come in the form of an ‘Operation Twist’-like approach, whereby the Fed sells shorter-maturity assets to purchase longer-maturity assets,” economists at Deutsche Bank Securities said in a report Friday. “The size of the Fed’s balance sheet will remain unchanged, but presumably longer-term interest rates would fall.”

If the result is to pull mortgage rates down further, that could allow more homeowners to refinance their loans -- assuming that they have equity left in their homes.

The 30-year T-bond yield also was sharply lower Friday, falling to a two-year low of 3.32% from 3.50% on Thursday.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch economists said that even if the Fed resorted to selling shorter-term Treasuries, it was unlikely to cause a “significant” rise in yields on those securities because demand remains robust from other investors, including money market funds and foreign central banks.

And if the stock market keeps tumbling, more spooked equity investors are likely to join the rush back to Treasuries. The Dow Jones industrials were down 251 points, or 2.2%, to 11,241 at about 11:40 a.m. PDT as recession fears flared anew.

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College degree doesn't pay as well as it used to, but it still beats high school-only

-- Tom Petruno

Photo: The Federal Reserve Building in Washington. Credit: Karen Bleier / AFP / Getty Images

Podcast: Job Creation, Cantor Fitzgerald and Keynes

The government’s report on hiring, which showed no gain in jobs in August, provided fresh evidence that the recovery has fizzled without ever gaining momentum.

The report increases the pressure on President Obama as he prepares to deliver an address next week about job creation, on Republicans who have a starkly different approach to economic revival, and on the Federal Reserve, whose policy makers have been divided over what to do next, Shaila Dewan says in a conversation in the new Weekend Business podcast.

While the new data was worse than expected, several economists said the problem is not that companies have been laying off their employees, though there was an uptick in announced layoffs, but that they have delayed investing in new workers.

The 10-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington is approaching, and perhaps more than any other company, the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald came to symbolize the horrors of that tragedy. Almost one-fourth of the people killed in New York City that morning worked for the firm. In a podcast conversation, Susanne Craig talks about the strategy of Howard W. Lutnick, who ran Cantor then and still does today. Mr. Lutnick has defied those who said that he and Cantor were finished, and he has rebuilt his firm.

In another podcast conversation and in the Economic View column in Sunday Business, Robert J. Shiller contends that the surge of stock market volatility over the last month cannot be explained by conventional means. He turns to the work of John Maynard Keynes, who once compared the stock market to a beauty contest. Keynes described a newspaper contest in which 100 photographs of faces were displayed, and readers were asked to choose the six prettiest. The winner would be the reader whose list of six came closest to the most popular of the combined lists of all readers. The best strategy, Keynes said, is to select those faces that you think others will think prettiest. Better yet, he said, move to the “third degree” — by picking the faces you think that others think that still others think are prettiest. Translated into the current market, investors appear to be trying to outguess one another.

　You can find specific segments of the podcast at these junctures: Shaila Dewan on the jobs report (23:36); news summary (19:23); Susanne Craig on Cantor Fitzgerald (17:23); Robert Shiller (8:05); the week ahead (1:05).

As articles discussed in the podcast are published during the weekend, links will be added to this post.

You can download the program by subscribing from The New York Times’s podcast page or directly from iTunes.

Gold, silver rocket as recession fears deepen

Gold and silver zoomed again Friday, ignoring strength in the dollar, as the dismal U.S. jobs report for August drove some investors back into haven-seeking mode.

Near-term gold futures in New York closed with a gain of $47.70, or 2.6%, to $1,873.70 an ounce. It was the metal’s biggest one-day advance since early August, and left it just 0.8% below the record closing high of $1,888.70 set on Aug. 22.

Silver also rocketed, rising $1.54, or 3.7%, to $43.02 an ounce. Silver remains below its 30-year high of $48.58 reached on April 29.

The government’s report that the economy created no net new jobs last month stoked fears that recession is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, after the global market turmoil in August. With stocks crumbling worldwide Friday, gold and silver attracted frightened money, just as they did for much of last month.

“This economy is in real trouble,” said Matt Zeman, a market strategist at Kingsview Financial in Chicago. What’s more, even though the Federal Reserve is expected to try another rescue by aiming to pull long-term interest rates lower, falling rates could help the case for gold by making bond yields less attractive as an alternative investment.

Gold and silver also got a boost as Europe’s never-ending debt crisis took another bad turn, as Greece fell behind on austerity measures it must meet to qualify for more euro-zone aid.

While the Dow Jones industrial average slumped 253.51 points, or 2.2%, to 11,240.26 on Friday, the average blue-chip stock in Europe fared much worse, tumbling 3.7%.

Europe’s latest mess helped bolster the dollar. The euro fell 0.4% to $1.419, its lowest level since Aug. 10. The dollar also gained against a number of other currencies.

Historically, what’s good for the dollar usually is bad for gold, its archrival. But gold has been in its own bullish world for much of the summer, paying little attention to the dollar’s moves.

The metal now looks primed to try another run for $2,000 an ounce. Gold reached $1,917 intraday on Aug. 22, then was slammed by profit-taking that took the price as low as $1,707 on Aug. 25.

With the economic backdrop worsening, “I think we’re going to see $2,000 gold here very, very shortly,” Zeman said.

The bigger question may be this one: If gold does top $2,000, does that spark another round of profit-taking -- or a panic rush in by investors who've so far missed gold's 11-year bull market?

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Photo: Gold bars at gold and silver separating plant in Vienna. Credit: Lisi Niesner / Reuters

California taxable sales rise in 2nd quarters of 2010 and 2011

 
Taxable sales in California rose by an estimated 9% in this year's second quarter, based on a preliminary review of cash receipts, the state's tax collection agency reported.

"This latest taxable sales report shows that our state began moving toward recovery in early 2010 and continues to show positive signs in early 2011,"  Jerome E. Horton, chairman of the California Board of Equalization, said Friday. "I remain optimistic that California's economy will continue moving forward."

Horton released the estimate together with final numbers for the same second-quarter period in 2010. Those sales rose by $5.2 billion, or 4.6%, over the same period in the prior year when the state was stuck in a deep recession.

Some of the strongest growth in 2010 occurred in Los Angeles County, where sales were up 3.6% in the second quarter of 2010. They increased by 3.8% in the city of Los Angeles and 16.1% in Long Beach.

By category, the biggest rise in sales was for gasoline, 15.5%,  mainly because of jumps in pump prices, the board said. Motor vehicles and parts were up by 19.4%. Electronic and appliance store sales rose by 7.9%.

Compiling the detailed report for 2010, which includes breakdowns for location and category of sales goods, is a complex task that takes almost a year to complete, said Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for the board.

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Wal-Mart online sellers skirt taxes

US auto sales power ahead in August despite turmoil 

-- Marc Lifsher

Photo: Pedestrians pass a Ross Dress for Less store in San Francisco. Credit: Noah Berger / Bloomberg

Calif. Legislature OKs bill to raise auto-sale documentation fees

 

The documentation fees auto dealers charge car buyers will go up by at least $25 if a state bill that has passed in both houses of the California Legislature is signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

AB 1215 by Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield (D-Woodland Hills) passed the state Assembly with a 67-4 vote after a state Senate vote of 30 to 4 on Tuesday.

Under the bill, auto retailers will be able to raise the documentation fees charged for processing auto purchases and lease agreements to $80 from $55 for new- and used-car purchases and from $45 for car leases.

Dealers would also be required to run the vehicle identification number of any used auto for sale on their lots through the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System to check whether the auto has a so-called branded title. Any vehicles showing up as having been totaled or bought back through a lemon law or a victim of some other catastrophe would get a red window sticker warning potential buyers of the auto's history.

Insurance carriers, repair shops, towing companies and salvage yards must report totaled vehicles to the database, overseen by the U.S. Justice Department.

The legislation is supported by law enforcement agencies, consumer groups and the California New Car Dealers Assn.

“This bill unleashes the power of technology to provide first in the nation consumer protections, cut red tape, and help save the state millions,” Blumenfield said.  “Buying a car, especially a used one, requires some detective work to determine its safety and value.  By requiring junk cars and death traps to be flagged with a warning sticker, consumers can see these vehicles for what they really are when shopping for a car.”

Blumenfield said California is the nation’s largest car market.  Last year, more than 800,000 used cars were sold through dealerships.

The bill is on Gov. Brown's desk for his signature or veto. 

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Photo: Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield (D-Woodland Hills), left, looks on as state Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) questions Michael Cohen, chief deputy director of the Department of Finance, during a state budget hearing at the Capitol in Sacramento on Feb. 23. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

Industry veteran Bob Lutz rejoins General Motors

 

The outspoken and colorful auto industry veteran Robert A. Lutz, who has worked for all the major American car companies and retired from General Motors Co. in May, has resurfaced. He is going back to GM to work as a part-time consultant.

Lutz, 79, started a second stint at GM in 2001, charged with revitalizing the automaker's vehicle lineup. He stayed with the company through its brief sojourn into bankruptcy in 2009.  He helped push a new generation of GM autos -- including the Buick LaCrosse, Cadillac SRX, GMC Terrain, Chevrolet Equinox and Chevrolet Camaro -- into the marketplace.

The vehicles have sold well,  helping GM to rebuild its brand. Through the first eight months of this year, GM has accounted for one out of every autos sold nationwide.

Lutz retired from his post as vice chairman of General Motors Co., ending a 47-year career in the industry, a little more than a year ago, but did some consulting work for Lotus, the British sports car company.

He’s known for his blunt speech and love of cars.

"Look, people," Lutz quotes himself in his recently published memoir, "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business," as once having told a group of executives at General Motors. "I tend to have a lot of ideas and strong views which are not necessarily correct.... I know I'm full of crap a lot of the time."

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Photo: Bob Lutz with a GMC Acadia SUV. Credit: General Motors

 

Stocks slide as jobs report worries investors

Led by a sharp decline in banks, the stock market is getting hit for the second day in a row as a disappointing jobs report is renewing concerns that the listless economy is headed for even deeper troubles.

Major stock indexes are bathed in a sea of red after a Labor Department report this morning showed that American employers added no new jobs last month while the jobless rate remained an extremely high 9.1%.

As of 10:50 a.m., the Dow Jones industrial average is down 209.94 points, or 1.8%, to 11,283.63. The Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 26.18 points, or 2.2%, to 1,178.24.

The financial sector is getting pummeled after reports that a federal agency overseeing housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could bring lawsuits against leading banks over money-losing mortgage securities they sold during the housing boom. A leading bank index is down almost 4%.

European stock markets fell sharply, with France and Germany both down more than 3% and Italy off almost 4%. Stocks in Greece were down 4.5%.

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Consumer Confidential: Soda warning; free Chick-fil-A meals

Here's your jumpin'-jack-flash Friday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:

--Public-health advocates are calling on Americans to go easy on the soda. A coalition of health and consumer groups would like to see Americans reduce their consumption to three cans per week. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, the American Heart Assn., the American Diabetes Assn. and more than 100 other groups are mounting a campaign to educate Americans about the risks of consuming too much sugar. Sugary drinks are the single largest source of calories in the American diet and account for half of all added sugars consumed. And unlike any other food or beverage, only sugary drinks have been shown to have a causal role in promoting obesity. The American Heart Assn. recommends that people limit their intake of sugary drinks to about 450 calories per week, or about three 12-ounce cans. Average consumption is now more than twice that.

--Speaking of calories, our friends at fast-food chain Chick-fil-A are giving away breakfasts to customers who make an online reservation. To participate in the promotion, which runs from Sept. 6 to Sept. 10, customers should go to chick-fil-aforbreakfast.com to find a participating restaurant near them and reserve the menu item of their choice, as well as the time they plan to pick it up (between 6:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.). Available dishes include: Chick-fil-A Chicken Biscuit; Chick-fil-A Spicy Chicken Biscuit; Sausage Biscuit; Chick-fil-A Chick-n-Minis; Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit; Chicken, Egg & Cheese on Sunflower Multigrain Bagel; Chicken Breakfast Burrito; Sausage Breakfast Burrito; and Multigrain Oatmeal.

-- David Lazarus

Photo: Those sugary drinks may not be your friend. Credit: Daniel Barry / Bloomberg News

 

Century City aircraft leasing firm files for public offering

Century City-based aircraft leasing company International Lease Finance Corp. unveiled plans for an initial public offering, a move that would take the firm out from under the wing of it parent company American International Group Inc.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, the leasing company known as ILFC said that “AIG has determined that ILFC is not one of its core businesses.”

AIG, the beleagured New York-based insurance corporation that received $182.5 billion in bailout money during the global financial crisis, said it would initially sell 20% of the leasing company and divest most of the unit over time.

The filing did not disclose how many shares would be sold or estimate their price, nor did it say when the stock sale would take place.

It marks the beginning of the end of AIG’s a 21-year ownership role over ILFC. AIG bought ILFC in 1990 for $1.3 billion in a stock swap.

But now AIG has been selling off business units in an attempt to pay back the federal government.

In the past, AIG has hinted at selling the aircraft leasing company, known as ILFC, but has been unable to close a deal.

For decades, ILFC has been an industry leader in aircraft leasing -- the business of buying planes and renting them to airlines. But the company fell on hard times when AIG nearly collapsed in 2008, which pinned both AIG and ILFC under government control and placed restrictions on the amount of money executives could make.

That confinement caused a mass exodus of ILFC's management team. The biggest blow came in February 2010 when company co-founder and then-Chief Executive Steven Udvar-Hazy abruptly left to start a rival business, Air Lease Corp., also based in Century City.

In May 2010, Henri Courpron, a former Airbus executive, was named CEO.

ILFC remains one of the world's largest aircraft leasing firms with a fleet of 933 aircraft. The company posted $2.2 billion in revenue in the six month period that ended June 30.

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Photo: ILFC Chief Executive Henri Courpron at the company's offices in Century City. Credit: Francine Orr/ Los Angeles Times

College degrees earn less than a decade ago

  A college degree isn’t quite as lucrative as it was in the past, the Economic Policy Institute said.

Factoring in inflation, the average wage for graduates without an advanced degree dropped nearly a dollar per hour over the last 10 years, according to new research.

After gains in the 1980s and 1990s, hourly wages for young men dropped to $21.77 last year from $22.75 in 2000. For women, wages tumbled to $18.43 from $19.38 an hour.

Other studies still suggest that a bachelor’s degree can help holders earn 84% more over a lifetime than people with just a high school diploma.

On Friday, the Labor Department announced that the nation’s unemployment rate in August was 9.1%, with about 14 million people without work. More than 9%, or about 1.3 million, are between 20 and 24 years old.

The unemployment rate is 9.7% for high school graduates without any college, compared to 5% for those with a bachelor’s degree or more.

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Photo: Graduates of the School of Theology celebrate during Emory University's commencement ceremony, in Atlanta. Credit: David Goldman / AP Photo

The Bright Side of Unemployment?

On Thursday the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development released its latest report on the hundreds of unemployed workers it has been following (and surveying) for two years. As you might expect from the report’s title — “Out of Work and Losing Hope: The Misery and Bleak Expectations of American Workers” — the report’s findings are discouraging.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

The typical jobless worker has been pounding the pavement for months and is running low on savings, friends and hope. Even the lucky workers who have found jobs are not exactly thriving, as most of the re-employed in the center’s survey have had to take pay cuts.

Dollars to doughnuts.

Even so, the report did manage to find some good that has come of its respondents’ unemployment spells:

The majority of the 675 workers surveyed in August — those whom the center was able to reach from its initial group of 1,202 workers first contacted in August 2009 — said they had worked on projects around the house.

A narrow majority (51 percent) also said they had “spent more enjoyable time” with their families as a result of being unemployed.

Smaller shares cited opportunities for self-improvement they had seized upon, such as additional education, training and volunteer work.

And a slim minority — 16 percent — even became “healthier through exercise.”

Clearly none of this means that all these workers would have been worse off if they’d kept their jobs. But it’s comforting to know that there has been a glimmer of silver lining for at least a few of the nation’s jobless.

A Challenge for Unions in Public Opinion

A new Gallup poll has found that a slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, approve of labor unions and that the difference in views between how Democrats and Republicans feel toward unions has reached record levels.

The Gallup poll, released on Thursday, found that the approval rate for unions was unchanged from 2010 and was up from 2009, when unions had the lowest approval rating, 48 percent, since Gallup began this survey in 1936.

Showing a huge partisan difference in views, the poll of 1,008 adults found that 78 percent of Democrats approve of unions, while just 26 percent of Republicans do, the lowest percentage ever for Republicans.

Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup’s managing editor, wrote, “This could reflect a greater politicization of union issues given the fact that many state-level efforts to curb union influence were promoted by Republican governors often backed by a Republican-controlled legislature.”

After Republicans swept to power in many states last November, the Republican governors of several states, most notably Wisconsin and Ohio, moved to curb collective bargaining by public-employee unions, an effort that generated huge resistance from labor unions and Democrats.

Mr. Jones wrote that the huge debate over union rights this year “seems to have resulted in a draw in the court of public opinion, with labor unions neither gaining nor losing Americans’ support overall compared with last year.”

The Gallup poll found a strong rebound of Democrats’ and independents’ views toward unions over the last two years. Approval among Democrats rose to 78 percent from 66 percent in 2009, and to 52 percent from 44 percent among independents. For Republicans, the approval rating was 26 percent this year, down from 34 percent last year (and 29 percent in 2009).

This year’s poll found that 52 percent of Americans approved of unions and 42 percent disapproved. (The survey was conducted Aug. 11 to 14 with 95 percent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.)

When the overall approval rating for unions fell to its lowest level ever in 2009, many labor relations said that was because many Americans believed that labor unions could be too stubborn and demanding and were a major cause of the General Motors and Chrysler bankruptcies that year. Union leaders maintain that a major reason for the overall decline in approval ratings in recent years — the approval rate was 65 percent less than a decade ago — is that conservative politicians and think tanks have been putting out a flood of negative information about organized labor.

Business groups say labor’s approval ratings have slid from decades past because many Americans feel they have good wages and benefits and no longer see a need for unions.

Labor leaders acknowledge that one of their biggest challenges is to figure out how to make Americans more enthusiastic about unions and unionizing at a time when many workers face stagnating wages, rising insecurity on the job and employers’ cutting back on pensions and other benefits — all while corporate profits have been quite strong.

Jobs report drives down stocks

Stock markets experienced their biggest declines in more than a week after new unemployment data stoked fears that the U.S. economy is slowing.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down in early trading 202.07 points, or 1.8%, to 11,291.50.

The declines came after the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added no new jobs in August, leaving the unemployment rate at 9.1%. The numbers were artificially lowered by 45,000 Verizon workers who were out of their jobs on strike, but economists still had expected more new jobs.

"The broad message is that even if the U.S. economy doesn't start to contract again, any expansion is going to be very, very modest and fall well short of what would be needed to drive the still elevated unemployment rate lower," the chief economist at Captial Economics, Paul Ashworth, wrote in a note to clients.

Even before the jobs report came out, European markets had headed down. Leading indexes in Germany and France were down recently more than 3%.

Bank stocks are again leading the U.S. markets down after reports Thursday night that the government is suing several big banks over losses from mortgage backed securities during the financial crisis.

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New-home slump keeping door shut on U.S. recovery

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Photo credit: Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Calling on the Fed

What I would give to be a fly on in the wall at the Federal Reserve right now, where Ben S. Bernanke is probably doing a double take on Friday’s horrible jobs report.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

The Fed’s recently released minutes from its August meeting showed huge disagreements over whether more monetary stimulus — and what form of monetary stimulus — was necessary. Many of the members of the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates, said they wanted to do something to help the economy, like further expanding or rejiggering the Fed’s balance sheet or decreasing the interest rate paid for banks’ excess reserves. And some wanted to do nothing.

Dollars to doughnuts.

Ultimately members decided to pledge to keep short-term interest rates near zero until “at least mid-2013,” although there was clearly more appetite from some of the members for more easing. The committee even decided to stretch out its September meeting to allow more time for discussion of these issues.

Publicly Mr. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has argued that government policy can and should play a significant role in helping the economy grow, but emphasized that Congress should be the ones to lead the way. Congress, however, is trying to tighten fiscal policy, which is the exact opposite of stimulus, and seems fairly entrenched in this view.

It will be interesting to see how this dismal jobs report, which didn’t even meet economists’ already very low expectations, affects the committee meeting. The Fed may not have much ammunition left, but perhaps this latest news will convince it to fire what bullets it has.

Many Wall Street economists, including those at Goldman Sachs and RBC Capital Markets, are now predicting that the Fed will announce a change in the composition of its balance sheet so that it holds more longer-term assets.

Comparing Recessions and Recoveries: Job Changes

Today’s jobs report is nothing but bad news.

The United States economy showed no net gain in jobs in August, the Labor Department reported, after having added an average of 53,000 in each of the three prior months. This was the worst jobs number since last September.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Hiring was essentially unchanged in almost every private industry. The biggest gain was in health care, which added 30,000 jobs, but health care has been growing steadily despite what happens to the rest of the economy. Government employment continued to fall.

Dollars to doughnuts.

The chart above shows economywide job changes in this last recession and recovery compared with other recent ones, with the black line representing the most recent downturn. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on balance, about 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that does not even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession.

The unemployment rate — measured by a different government survey, and based on how many people are without jobs but are actively looking for work — was unchanged in August, at 9.1 percent.

There are now 14 million workers who are looking for work and cannot find it; the figure nearly doubles if you include workers who are in part-time jobs but want to be employed full time, and those who want to work but have stopped looking. A broader measure of the unemployment rate that includes these underemployed workers is 16.1 percent.