US Job Growth Falls Short of Forecasts

The September jobs report that came out at 8:30 a.m. Bloomberg's Julie Finn was our lead reporter covering the data release, and she joins us now. So coming into this data point, it looked like the labor economy was doing very well. And then we get the surprise, which shows us much smaller than expected increase in the number of jobs added. While it was a smaller number than expected, I will say a lot of economists are still saying that if you look at the three month average, which is what a lot of economists are doing right now, because there's been so much volatility with the numbers, that number is 51,000 and that's above the breakeven rate. So even though it was a much smaller than expected number, economists aren't too worried. But it is also not a heating up economy not a heating up economy. And we say that because we look at average hourly earnings, which came in a little bit cooler than expected, it came in cooler than expected. And I think that also helps the fact you're seeing that the job market is not pushing up inflation. But as we know now, a year over year average hourly earnings were 3%. That's the lowest since 2020. Your chart on average hourly earnings is the most important chart of the report. I mean that after adjusting for any kind of inflation is pretty grim. I will say that it's a little bit wonky, but when the report was taken because it was ending before the 15th, sometimes that can make average hourly earnings a little bit lower.