US employment snapshot
No need here for further daft commentary on the US developments overnight.
The nonfarm payrolls figures just dropped, so here's a 30-second snapshot of what's going down in the final full update before the US election day on November 3.
A miss on the headline numbers, with nonfarm payrolls up by +661,000 in September some way behind the +850,000 expectation, but July and August were revised up by a combined +145,000, so it wasn't a huge miss.
This was the 5th consecutive monthly gain for employment, following the catastrophic 21 million decline in April, and 11½ million jobs have now been recovered.
Total nonfarm payrolls of 141.720 million were still some 9.8 million lower than a year earlier, despite the rebound.
With the participation rate dropping from 61.7 per cent to 61.4 per cent in September, the unemployment rate also fell for a 5th consecutive month, now down to 7.9 per cent, having initially run close to 15 per cent back in April.
The number of unemployed persons fell by 1 million to 12.6, which was a 5th straight monthly decline.
The underemployment rate also continued to fall to 12.8 per cent, well down from the April peak of 22.8 per cent.
Not great, but the US economy is at least steadily healing...if not the political landscape.
