Jobless Claims Show American Job Machine Sputtering

Almost a year ago, chief economic strategist Dan Greenhaus of Miller Tabak & Co. told his clients the U.S. economy would recover while jobs would be scarce. It would follow the pattern of the two prior so-called jobless rebounds, with unemployment climbing after the slumps ended.

“I didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the people I knew getting fired,” he said in a telephone interview from New York. “Companies over-fired during the recession and now demand is not picking up sufficiently to bring back a meaningful amount of people.”