Highlights of the October 2020 non-farm payrolls report:
- Prior was 661K
- Unemployment rate 6.9% vs 7.6% expected
- Prior unemployment rate 7.9%
- Participation rate 61.7% vs 61.5% expected
- Prior participation rate 61.4%
Unemployment falling by a full point with a 0.3 pp rise in participation is wildly impressive.
- Unemployment rate 6.9% vs 7.6% expected
- Prior unemployment rate 7.9%
- Unemployment 7.2% including misclassified workers
- Participation rate 61.7% vs 61.5% expected
- Prior participation rate 61.4%
- Underemployment rate 12.1% vs 12.8% prior
- Average hourly earnings +0.2% m/m vs +0.1% expected
- Average hourly earnings +4.5% y/y vs +4.5% expected
- Average weekly hours 34.8 vs 34.7 expected
- Two month net revision +15K
- Change in private payrolls +906K vs +680K expected
- Change in manufacturing payrolls +38K vs +55K expected
- Government jobs cut 268K from payrolls (half were census layoffs)
- 3.56m unemployed for 27 weeks or more (long term threshold) vs 2.41m prior
Everything about this report is impressive. You would expect a stumble at some point but it never comes. The proxies for this report were weak but there's nothing like that in the data.
No amount of new cases seems to slow down the recovery as companies and people learn to work around the pandemic.
The FX market has hardly moved on the data but that's not a big surprise given the backdrop around the election.
