U.S. Labor Market Stayed Tight in September: NFP +263k, Jobless Rate Falls to 3.5%

By Geoffrey Smith 

Investing.com — The U.S. economy continued to add jobs at a solid rate in September, with employment growth slowing only slightly from August,. 

employment rose by 263,000 through the middle of the month, the Labor Department said on Friday – a little more than the 250,000 expected and only a moderate drop from August’s number of 315,000, which was left unrevised. 

The ticked down to a new low of 3.5% of the workforce from 3.7% in August, suggesting that the scramble for workers has hardly eased up despite increasing signs of a slowdown in parts of the economy. It’s now where it was immediately before the Covid-19 pandemic erupted early in 2020.

Even so, there was no sign of wage pressures accelerating, as continued to grow at a steady clip of 0.3%. As such, growth slowed in year-on-year terms to 5.0% from 5.2% in August, well behind the rate of inflation.

The modest rise in earnings growth helped to keep the initial market reaction relatively muted, at the end of a week when investors have bet heavily that the slowing economy will force the Federal Reserve to abandon its course of interest rate increases earlier, and at a lower terminal level, than the central bank is predicting. Fed officials have repeatedly pushed back against such expectations in the last couple of days. 

By 08:45 ET (1245 GMT), the yield on the interest-rate sensitive Treasury note was up 6 basis points at 4.31%, while the note yield was up 7 basis points at 4.13%.

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