October Payrolls, Average Hourly Earnings Disappoint, Miss Big

Well, with virtually everyone expecting a 300K+ payrolls number after last month’s negative hurricane-distorted print, and with whispers of a 400K print floating around, it only made sense that not only would payrolls disappoint, printing at 261K, one standard deviation below the 310K consensus estimate (even though September was revised higher from -33K to +18K)…

…but also that the far more important average hourly earnings number, which was expected to rise at a 2.7% rate Y/Y, also missed, printing at 2.4% instead with September revised lower to 2.8%. Worse, on a monthly basis, there was no wage increase at all, printing at 0.0%, below the 0.2% expected, and the lowest since June 2015.

At least the unemployment rate dropped to a new cycle low, declining from 4.2% to 4.1%, below the 4.2% expected.