Payrolls Printed 165,000. Our Error Band Stopped at 126,000, and the Miss We Built It From Was Revised in Half.
US October payrolls printed 165,000 against the 65,000 consensus we reported on Thursday, and 106,000 above the 59,000 a fifth reader gave on Friday.
It beat the most bullish house in our file, RSM US at 95,000, by 70,000. Worse for us: we published an error band of 4,000 to 126,000, derived from September's 61,000 miss, and the print landed 39,000 above its top — while the same release revised September from 29,000 to 60,000 and August from 133,000 to 186,000, cutting the miss our band was built on in half. The band was too wide and too low at once, because it was centred on the consensus and the consensus was what was wrong. The three-month average we gave as context on Friday, 51,000, is now 137,000: one release moved a trend measure by a factor of 2.7. Both wage fields went hawkish — 0.4% monthly to $38.00 and 3.1% annual, where we had flagged the fields disagreeing as the likely outcome. And 55% of the beat is one sector: professional and business services at +70,000 against its own 15,000 twelve-month average, with health care another 11,000 above trend. Against it, part-time for economic reasons rose 339,000, more than twice the headline gain, on an unchanged 34.4-hour week. Canada printed in the same minute: −4,700 and unemployment at 6.7%, which Statistics Canada declines to call a six-month high even though three wires do, over a private-sector fall of 53,000 against a public-sector rise of 50,000.