On the October Jobs Report

Just in time for the mid-terms, the fourth-best October since the Great Recession, ten years into the expansion. Payrolls at 250,000 were a big beat without and noise from revisions. The unemployment rate ticked up one half of a percentage point (within rounding error for the 3.7% headline) as 711,000 persons entered the labor force, with 16% of them unemployed. Year-over-year average hourly earnings turned in a new record high for this expansion at 3.1%, but that’s only because an exceptionally weak datapoint one year ago dropped out. Monthly gains were meager, and annualize to a lower growth rate than one year ago. There is nothing here that would make the Fed worry about wage inflation.