Uhhhhhh....

Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in October (+12,000), following an average monthly gain of 194,000 over the prior 12 months. In October, employment continued to trend up in health care and government. Temporary help services lost jobs. Employment declined in manufacturing due to strike activity. (See table B-1.)

Well now that is a miss.

But this is not-so-good:

Health care added 52,000 jobs in October, in line with the average monthly gain of 58,000 over the prior 12 months. Over the month, employment rose in ambulatory health care services (+36,000) and nursing and residential care facilities (+9,000).

That's close to a double from the averages over quite some time, but its the "new normal" and yet our health care is, when you look at objective metrics, both ridiculously more-expensive and not as effective.  So this says that cost has gone up but output, measured by both quality and quantity of life per-person, hasn't.  This is just about math with no adjustment for how someone feels (which does matter, but in economic terms... not so much.)

Within professional and business services, employment in temporary help services declined by 49,000 in October. Temporary help services employment has decreased by 577,000 since reaching a peak in March 2022.

"Layoffs" start here.  There is no severance required.  When companies find themselves with what they perceive as "too much" labor the first people who get cut are temporary workers.  Here we go.

I've been tracking for 20+ years the 12 month adjusted employment number (for working-age population) and it has been in the dumps; not having a positive month since last November.  The particularly-troubling shift in that number has stubbornly refused to show up in the headline or other metrics, including employment/population ratio or weekly paychecks -- until now.

The market's immediate reaction was not to collapse; the best read on that is futures players think The Fed will add more gasoline to the liquidity fire.  We'll see on that; I have maintained their original 50bips was a large policy mistake, still believe it was, and that inflation is coming roaring back in the early part of next year no matter who wins Tuesday.  The bigger question here, particularly with the revisions in this report (August, specifically, was revised down from +159 to +78, so by half) leads one to ask lots of questions; sampling error, of course, is always real but when you miss by 50% and all the misses are in one direction it's hard to believe that's the explanation.

This time, however, all the internal data sets -- weekly checks .vs. hourly rate, employment rates among all four educational attainment groups and more tracked the headline number, so I see nothing in this specific report that flags as being wrong, whether from sampling error or otherwise.

IMHO something wicked this way comes, and softening employment into an inflationary spike in another 2-3 months is exactly the sort of 1970s outcome that occurred from what, from my analysis, looks like the same policy error that was made then.

This is a bad number -- especially on the back of last month's report.

The unemployment rate declined to 3.7 percent in September, and total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 134,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, in health care, and in transportation and warehousing.

This is utterly nasty and the drop in the unemployment rate is entirely due to an increase in the NILF figure -- people who have left the workforce.

Let's look inside:

In a word: Meh.

The 12 month change is below 2m.  The rate has been over 2m for roughly the last year, but now it is solidly below.  That's bad news, because the increase in working-age population is approximately 2 million, so if you can't manage to put up that number on a 12 month rolling basis you are losing ground.

Heh, look at that "formal unemployment rate" -- it's a multi-generational low.  But does it mean anything?

Not really since there the employment:population ratio is nowhere near the 1969 figures.  Having an "unemployment rate" that is extremely low because people aren't looking for jobs but are either sucking off public assistance or otherwise out of the workforce isn't positive -- it's negative since only working people pay taxes.

Have you looked at the annualized "debt to the penny" figures lately?  No?  Well maybe you should.  I'll help you out with that in the next few days in my usual annual report on exactly how much bullshit Washington DC has emitted into the "economy" and thus the fraud embedded in the GDP "expansion" rate.

Once again having a Bachelors or better did not outperform; all of the educational categories gained, but both high school dropouts and degree-holders managed one tick of advancement.  "Some College" and High School graduates both gained more, however, meaning that once again we are making McJobs and not, as is often said, positions for the "highly educated."

There are also indications of slack in the part-time statistics but this month I ignore them because of Florence.  If they persist into next month, however, they are likely an early indication of a negative turn in the economy and employment situation.

We shall see.