MarketWatch

The long-delayed September employment report showed the U.S. created 119,000 new jobs, a surprisingly robust increase that could give the Federal Reserve more reason to shelve a third interest-rate cut in a row next month.
The increase in new jobs was the largest since April, but hiring has slowed down sharply this year. Indeed, the economy lost jobs in June and August.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, rose to 4.4% from 4.3%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Thursday.
That's the highest rate in four years, but the increase largely stems from more people entering the labor force in search of work. They are counted as unemployed until they find a job.
The September employment report was delayed for more than a month and a half by the longest government shutdown in history.
The new information on the labor market, however, will help fill in the blanks for Fed officials and Wall Street investors who were partly blinded by long delays in a raft of critical government data on jobs and inflation.
Fed officials are deeply divided over whether to trim a key U.S. interest rate in December for the third month in a row. Some officials worry more about elevated inflation while others contend the labor market is even weaker than it looks.
What will make the Fed’s job harder is that the October and November employment estimates won’t be published until a week after the central bank’s early December gathering.
Nor has the BLS said whether it will produce an October report on consumer price index. The agency also hasn’t released a date for the November CPI.