On the September Jobs Report

With a big headline miss and large downward revisions, this morning's payrolls fell short of consensus expectations by 118,000. This makes the Fed's relentless posturing of "liftoff" coming "later this year" both wrong and ridiculous, and the Fed can afford to be neither. This bolsters our concern that the US economy has slipped into the first-ever recession caused by low oil prices . The Fed's credibility-destroying wrong-headedness in the face of this reality is making matters worse. We continue to think that QE4 is more likely than "liftoff" at this point -- with the key question being when the Fed will admit it.