news jobs and oil

Dismal Jobs Report Riles Wall Street

American companies added just 71,000 jobs in July—below analysts' expectations and far less than the 200,000 new monthly jobs needed to lower the unemployment rate. The jobless data, reported Friday morning by the Labor Department, sent markets sharply lower. By Friday afternoon, the Dow was down over 130 points. The unemployment rate for July remained at 9.5 percent and the "underemployment" rate held at 16.5 percent from June. Economist Dean Baker writes in The Daily Beast about the dismal outlook for the rest of the year, plus where the jobs are—and are not.

Read it at The Daily Beast

BP Eyes Reservoir Below Capped Well

BP might drill once more in the same undersea pocket of oil in the Gulf whose catastrophic leak they just plugged, the company said Friday. "There's lots of oil and gas here," BP's chief operating officer, Doug Suttles, said. "We're going to have to think about what to do with that at some point." Until Suttles announced Friday that BP would use the relief well, now days away from intersecting with the wellhead, to seal the well from the bottom, the company had been hedging regarding exactly how they planned to use it—if left unplugged, BP could use it to extract the estimated $4 billion worth of crude still in the reservoir. That sum must look especially attractive to the company as it potentially faces tens of billions of dollars in liabilities from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Of course, reopening the well would do nothing to help BP's popularity in the region. "People died out there on that rig," Linda Kaye Randolph, a real-estate investor in the area said in an interview Thursday. "It isn't about the money. It would bother me that they're not respecting the people who died there. There's thousands of other wells. They can find another place. Leave that one alone."

Read it at CBS News