The Most Important Jobs Report In Four Years

...and it may not actually matter one bit to voters in 2016.  Needless to say, it's a good report: October saw 161K new jobs and the unemployment rate down to 4.9%, but voters really don't seem to care at all about jobs (despite saying they do.)

U.S. jobs continued to gain at a steady pace in October and wage gains accelerated, signs that the labor market and economy made steady progress at the start of the fourth quarter. 

Payrolls climbed by 161,000 last month following a 191,000 gain in September that was larger than previously estimated, a Labor Department report showed Friday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 173,000. The jobless rate fell to 4.9 percent, while wages rose from a year earlier by the most since 2009.

The figures are likely to keep the Federal Reserve on track to raise borrowing costs next month for the first time in 2016. Underlying the steady gains in employment is a balance between hiring managers’ need to keep up with stable domestic demand and the struggle to match more limited labor to skilled-job vacancies. 

“As it continues to tighten up, firms are going to have to resort more and more to more attractive pay to draw people in,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in New York, said before the report. “We’re pretty close to full employment.” 

Workers have been in short supply for 13 straight months, according to the Institute for Supply Management survey of service-industry companies, which make up almost 90 percent of the economy. 

The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 173,000 advance in payrolls. Estimates in the Bloomberg survey ranged from gains of 105,000 to 208,000 after a previously reported 156,000 September increase. 

Revisions added a total of 44,000 jobs to payrolls in the previous two months.

So 205K total new jobs with the upward revisions, but we're still in real danger of giving the country away to a walking orange bankruptcy (both moral and financial) because Obama failed us with 80 straight months of job growth and Clinton's a real bitch or something.

God we're going to miss the man.