Hospitals, doctors’ offices, restaurants and retailers all added jobs in August.

But the bright spots were few and far between. Employment in the finance sector — which includes real estate agencies and accounts for about 8.5 million of the country’s 138 million jobs — was flat in August, which could be a sign that the government numbers have not yet captured some of the mortgage-related job cuts now occurring.

The surveys that made up the Labor Department report measured employment from Aug. 12 to Aug. 18, when the credit squeeze and subsequent stock market turmoil were under way but not fully felt. Since then, some large lenders like Countrywide and Lehman Brothers have continued to lay off workers. And just today, IndyMac Bancorp, a large mortgage lender, said it would be cutting about 1,000 jobs over the next several months.

“There probably was not that much influence in the data from the credit shock,” said Richard Berner, chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley. “So I think more weakness in the economy is likely. The economy is clearly losing momentum.”

The extent to which the economy continues to lose momentum will determine the Fed’s course of action. The price of a futures contract tied to Fed policy shows that the central bank will probably cut the benchmark rate, now at 5.25 percent, to 4.5 percent by the end of the year. But a growing number of economists are saying that might not be soon enough.

Mr. Gault of Global Insight, who is forecasting a half-point cut on Sept. 18, said it would send “an important message that the Fed sees there are real problems here, there’s a real threat, and it needs to have a response that’s commensurate to that threat.”

Although the unemployment rate held steady at 4.6 percent, the percentage of adults with jobs fell to 62.8 percent, from 63 percent in July and a peak of 63.4 percent in December. The number of people who were neither working nor looking for work — and thus considered neither employed nor unemployed by the government — rose by almost 600,000 in August.

“That’s a sign of economic weakness,” Mr. Anderson, of Wells Fargo, said. “Perhaps people just gave up trying to find jobs.”