On the September Jobs Report

A huge beat with 336,000 net payrolls, all the more amazing for strong upward revisions to the prior two months. It is not plausible, flying in the face of a panoply of other labor market metrics, and the "household survey" that showed an increase in employment of only 86,000 (indeed, a contraction of 7,000 on a "payroll basis"). Seasonal and birth-death adjustments don't explain it (they cut the other way). However implausible, there's nothing here to suggest pending recession. It's a hawkish headline for Powell who seems to always cherry-pick the worst from among available data. That said, average hourly earnings growth is the lowest in nine months, on the back of a downward revision to last month's, and now below the long-term historical average. The money-market curve is still only giving a fifty-fifty chance of one final rate hike, cumulatively over the next three FOMCs. We'll take the under: zero and done.