The US gained 114K jobs in September according to the fresh Non-Farm Payrolls report. Early expectations stood on a gain of 114K jobs, a bit higher than the initial report for August: +96K, that is now revised. The unemployment rate was expected to stand on 8.2% and it fell to 7.8% – quite a shocker. What’s interesting to note is that revisions for August and July add no less than 86K.
EUR/USD traded around the 1.30 line and it initially rose. USD/JPY traded around 78.40 and is now jumping to 78.75. So EUR/JPY is shooting higher.
Update: Technical analysis of where EUR/USD could go from here.
The details (updated soon):
- Non Farm Payrolls: +114K.
- Participation rate: 63.6% (+0.1)
- Unemployment rate: 7.8%. – Lowest since January 2009
- Revisions: August was revised to a gain of 142K instead of 96K. July sawa a revision from 141K to 181K. All in all, it’s a gain of 86K jobs.
- Private sector NFP: +104K – still less than expected and less than ADP.
- Real unemployment rate (U-6): 14.7% – exactly like the previous month. This includes people who are too discouraged to look for a job. The number is certainly discouraging.
- Employment to population ratio: 58.7% (+0.4%)
- Average hourly earnings: +0.1% (as expected).
The NFP figure has an important impact on the elections. The Obama camp needed a good report to counter the bad debate performance.
The reason that the unemployment rate slid to 8.1% in August (according to the initial report), was a drop in the participation rate, which fell to 63.5%.
This figure, became more important after Ben Bernanke referred to it in the post QE3 press conference: the Fed is not looking only at the unemployment rate, but also at the bigger picture.
Without an improvement in the participation rate (and also in the employment to population rate), the economy will find it hard to grow convincing manner.
In Canada, employment numbers also exceeded expectations, with a leap of over 50K jobs.
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