The jobless rate in the world's biggest economy climbed to 9.7pc, higher than the 9.5pc expected by economists and up from 9.4pc in July. President Obama has said that he expects the unemployment rate to reach 10pc before beginning to fall.
The figures from the Labor Department underline the challenges facing the leaders of the G20 countries who will grapple with when to pull back the stimulus given the global economy in the past 12 months.
Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury Secretary who is in London for the meeting of G20 finance ministers, said this week that there is a long way to go before the global economy can declare a durable recovery.
“The labour market’s healing process is agonisingly slow,” Joshua Shapiro, chief US economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez, told Bloomberg. “We expect the improvement to remain a very slow one, and therefore for the household sector to be contending with a weak labour market for some time.”
However, there was brighter news in the number of jobs lost in the month of August. Companies axed 216,000 jobs in the month compared with the 230,000 earmarked by economists. Monthly job losses in the US peaked at 741,000 in January.
Companies in the US, Britain and other major western economies have said that the threat of unemployment is continuing to weigh on consumers.
