With 15 million jobless Americans facing a grim holiday season, President Barack Obama has announced several programmes to boost US employment.

They include tax cuts for small businesses that hire people. Obama tried to put the best spin on the recovery as he made the announcement. He said: “We can safely say that we are no longer facing the potential collapses of our financial system, and we have avoided the depression many feared. Our economy is growing for the first time in a year and the swing from contraction to expansion, since the beginning of the year, is the largest in nearly three decades. Finally we are no longer seeing the severe deterioration in the job market that we once were, in fact we learned on Friday that the unemployment rate fell slightly last month.” But it is still at 10 percent of the working population. In his speech Obama stressed that boosting jobs was the best way to tackle the huge US budget deficit but he gave few details on the scale or cost of the job measures.More about: Banking, Financial Crisis, Unemployment

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