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WASHINGTON : US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Tuesday warned jobless Americans they face a torrid year ahead, predicting continued high unemployment levels despite advances "sometime this spring."
Speaking in Congress, Geithner said some improvements in the decimated US job market would come soon, but not enough to eat into the near double-digit unemployment that has brought the crisis into ordinary Americans' homes.
He warned that more than 100,000 jobs need to be created each month to push the jobless rate down from its current level of 9.7 percent.
"Because we do not expect job growth substantially over 100,000 per month over the remainder of the year, we do not expect substantial further declines in unemployment this year," he warned.
"Indeed, the rate may rise slightly over the next few months as some workers return to the labor force, before beginning a steady downward trend."
An estimated 8.4 million Americans have lost their jobs since the recession began in late 2007.
Losses have spread throughout the country -- well beyond the already depressed industrial heartlands -- with knock-on effects for everything from consumer spending to bank lending.
At the depths of the crisis in early 2009, some 750,000 jobs were being lost each month.
While most other indicators point to a modest economic recovery already underway, unemployment levels have remained stubbornly high, prompting fears of a jobless recovery.
Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur of Ohio embodied that discontentment Tuesday.
She tore into Geithner for his failure to address the employment crisis, warning that "people are becoming desperate" in her heavily-industrialized midwestern state.
Kaptur described a bleak picture of lengthening queues for food handouts and scores of home foreclosures. "My people are suffering, they are at the edge," she said.
Geithner, who has frequently faced calls to resign over his backing of massive bank bailouts, responded with a rugged defense of administration policies, which he said had saved between one and two million jobs.
"The big problems we face today were all years in the making," he said. "That the shocks did not precipitate a second Great Depression is a testament to the swift and strong policy response by the administration and Congress."
With mid-term elections looming later this year, President Barack Obama has stepped up effort to ease unemployment, setting out an ambitious strategy to double US exports and backing tax cuts for small businesses.
Despite this, Geithner warned that by the end of 2012 -- around the time of the next presidential elections -- unemployment would stand at around 7.9 percent.
- AFP /ls
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