US employers add 165,000 jobs in October, far above forecasts

Today's jobs report showed way more jobs created last month than expected, 165,000 versus an estimate of just 65,000. Plus, we saw notable big revisions to the upside to the prior two months. The sectors that are leading it have been sectors that have been carrying the water for some time now. That's health, that's education. Another big bright spot, actually, growth in manufacturing jobs. If you look over the first year of Donald Trump's second term, We lost almost 100,000 manufacturing jobs. That's pretty much fully retraced. Also notably, over the last three months, all of the job gains and all of the growth in the workforce have come from foreign-born workers. But people who lose a job are finding it harder to find a new one. And the average length of unemployment is now 27.1 weeks, which is the highest in about four years. And if you look past. The bulge up that we'd seen during COVID, it's the highest in about a decade. Wage gains are a little bit over 3% over the last year. So that's a little bit south of the inflation rate. And we saw that exasperation, that frustration play out this week with the election results. For the Fed, this has put greater pressure, again, on thinking about a rate hike come their next meeting in December. Over the last few days, the odds of a December rate hike diminished to under 60% or so. In the face of the big stock market tumult, we'd seen the pounding of tech stocks, particularly over the last few days. With today's numbers, we're back up at about 80%. It clearly signals that the employment side of the Fed's mandate is not where they need to To focus their concern. They need to focus their concern on inflation that has been running above their 2% target now for more than five years.