The good news in today's jobs report is that at 248K, more jobs than expected were added in September.
And now, the bad news.
Recall that with the unemployment rate having become such a joke even the Fed is openly ignoring it as it has made a laughing joke of its 6.5% threshold "forward guidance", and with the monthly "increase" in jobs irrelevant when one ignores the quality component of the actual jobs gained, the major aspect of the jobs report that the Fed, and pundits, are focusing on is the monthly increase or decrease in average hourly earnings.
What happened in September when the BLS just reported that average hourly earnings [6] for all private industries were $24.53, is that this was only one of 6 months since the failure of Lehman, when there a sequential decline in average hourly earnings, down from $24.54 in August.
And just as bad, while the Sellside consensus was looking for a 2.2% annual increase in wages, the actual number was a mere 2.0%, which means that the trend of declining real wages, profiled most recently here [7], continues.
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