By John Dempsey, WLS News
(CHICAGO) The U.S. Labor Department says employers added 292 thousand jobs in December, with the unemployment rate staying at five percent. Bankrate.com Senior Economic Analyst Mark Hamrick told “The Big John Howell Show” on WLS, that is good news, especially in light of this week’s slide on Wall Street, and gloomy economic news from China. “With all these storm clouds remaining over much of the global economy, we can say that the U.S. isn’t all sunshine but there are some positive stories to tell and this is a better than expected story this morning.”
Hamrick disagrees with analysts who think the U.S. may be headed for the kind of recession we saw in 2008. He says back then, all of the problems were based here in the United States, as opposed to the current economic issues, which are all centered on overseas countries. “First of all most of the stresses we’ve seen, for example this week, have really come overseas. The U.S. experience (in 2008) in that awful financial crisis, really was an American-made problem.”
Despite this morning’s positive news, Hamrick still finds cause for concern in the U.S. Economy. He says a recent Bankrate.com survey found that 63 percent of Americans do not even have 500 dollars to cover an emergency expense. “One of the reasons why I think Americans don’t feel entirely comfortable, they’re spending much of the money they’re getting, as soon as they get it. We have found that a quarter of Americans surveyed that the would-be savings they have at the gasoline pump, is simply being used to cover necessities.”
Another negative, according to Hamrick, is the fact that wages are still rising at a gloomy pace in the U.S. “You know we are celebrating this morning for example within this jobs report that we see average hourly earnings up 2.5 percent over the past year, that is better in terms of what we’ve been seeing in recent months and frankly years but historically, that’s a low level.”
@ 2015 WLS News
