A top White House economic advisor said U.S. businesses should plow more of their profits into job-creating investment.

There is a lot of money sitting on the sidelines. They ought to be using it, the head of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, said in an interview aired Sunday on TV One.

The overall jobs picture was headed the right way, he said, even if payrolls expanded by a meager 36,000 jobs in January.

The unemployment rate has dropped 0.8 percentage points since November, to 9 percent, the biggest two-month decline since 1958, a government report showed Friday.

But the creation of jobs is not taking place fast enough, Goolsbee said.

It's got to be faster and the president is the first to say that, he said.

(Reporting by Jim Wolf; editing by Bill Trott)

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