When it comes to the financial markets, there is no data more important than the monthly jobs report from the Labor Department. Today we learned that 171,000 new jobs were added during the month of October. We also learned that the unemployment rate rose to 7.9%, one tick higher than when President Obama took office.

I was curious to see how past presidents stacked up in the area of job creation so I compiled the data and created a series of charts to illustrate the results. My study dates back to January 1940, during FDR’s term, and measures the increase or decrease in new jobs from one month to the next. For example, if 100,000 jobs were added one month and 25,000 jobs were lost the following month, the net new jobs would be 75,000. The first chart shows that the most prolific job creator over the past 73 years was President Clinton followed by Presidents Reagan and Johnson. In last place was President Obama.

Because the number of months in office varied for each president, I calculated the average new jobs per month. The following chart contains the results.

This brings a slightly different perspective to the discussion. Again, the most prolific job creator on an average per month basis was President Clinton, followed by Presidents Carter and Johnson. Once again, President Obama is in last place.

Campaign Rhetoric?

During the campaign, we’ve heard the President say that, during his administration, 5 million new jobs have been created. Actually, the correct figure is 4.8 million. However, this calculation eliminates all months in which jobs were lost. In other words, it only counts months in which job creation was positive and eliminates the negative months. The following chart contains the results.

When you exclude months with negative jobs data, Clinton still leads the pack. In this case, Kennedy is in last place, but remember, he was only in office for 34 months. Again, President Obama is near the bottom.

To level the playing field, I examined the average new jobs created on a monthly basis excluding negative months. Here are the results.

Economists agree that it takes about 200,000 or more new jobs each month to grow the economy. In the previous chart, you can see which president had job growth in excess of this number. Therefore, it can be stated that our current path is weak, and unless there is a drastic change in direction, it will continue to be weak for quite some time. There are, however, times when an economy recovers despite the policies in place at the time. For a variety of reasons I don’t believe this is one of those times.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2012/11/02/the-real-story-of-job-creation/