The White House is “not worried about a double dip recession,” President Barack Obama's top economic advisor said Friday after an anemic employment report. In an interview with MSNBC and in a written statement, Christina Romer stressed the private sector had created jobs for the seventh consecutive month, after the Labor Department reported 131,000 jobs were lost across the economy. “We have made substantial progress from the days when employment was declining by 750,000 a month,” Romer said, while warning “there will likely be more bumps in the road ahead as the economy recovers.” The US economy shed more jobs than expected in July, the Labor Department said Friday, heightening fears that the world's largest economy will take years to fully recover from a crippling recession. Some 131,000 jobs were lost and the unemployment rate remained stuck at 9.5 percent, the department said, as federal and local government slashed jobs. The private sector was unable to offset a massive government layoff of 143,000 census-takers, with firms creating a modest 71,000 jobs in the month. The figures were seen as yet another sign that the US economic recovery is stagnating, and that the jobs market may take years to get back on its feet. “The current pace of employment is too slow to replace the more than eight million jobs lost in the recession - not in the next year or two, perhaps even not in the next five years,” said Bart van Ark, chief economist of The Conference Board, a business research firm. “It's unlikely that industries such as construction and manufacturing will ever return to pre-recession employment levels.” Revisions to June figures also compounded fears, with the Labor Department saying 221,000 jobs had been lost versus the 125,000 earlier reported. That piled pressure on President Barack Obama to prove his economic policies are working. Ahead of November midterm elections Obama's Republican opponents leaped on the data as evidence that massive economic stimulus spending had not worked. “President Obama's economic policies have failed to create sustainable job growth,” said Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele. Analysts had predicted the ranks of working Americans would shrink by around 87,000 in July, helping to push the unemployment rate up to 9.6 percent. For months investors have anxiously awaited any clue of where the economy is headed, with data frequently providing a confused snap shot. That trend appears to have continued, leaving policy makers - including Obama - facing tough choices about whether new crisis measures are needed. The Federal Reserve's rate-setting panel meets Tuesday to ponder restarting stimulus policies.
