The economy ALWAYS adds jobs headed into the holidays.
>>>The economy needs 200k per WEEK just to stay even. That 103k for the month is short by about 700k.
I think your figures are off by a considerable amount. Even in 2005, the best year for jobs growth in the last decade, the monthly change in payrolls averaged 208,000. By your figures, we would have been 600,000 short per month. Yet the unemployment rate declined through the year from 5.3% to 4.9%.
Huh? No, your are incorrect. It sounds like you are mixing up reports or something. The economy needs to add about 100,000ish jobs per month to account for population growth. That is approximately what we are getting which is why the unemployment rate has stuck at 9.1% for so long. If we actually added 800,000 per month it would signal a very rapid expansion and the unemployment rate would drop dramatically.
The weekly jobless claims is something entirely different. Even in a very good economy there are hundreds of thousands of new unemployment claims each week. If the number of new weekly jobless claims is over 400,000 it generally signals a very sluggish job market. Anything under 400,000 generally signals some job growth. If we start seeing numbers around 350,000 or under it means we are seeing more significant job growth.