Unemployment Rate Ticks Higher to 7.3% in October

The consensus from analysts and economists was that the US government added a total of 120,000 non-farm payroll jobs in October. Some estimates that I saw had just 75,000 jobs being added in October, largely due to the assumed fallout from the federal government shutdown.
In the end, the United States added 204,000 non-farm payroll jobs in October, which easily bested even the rosiest of estimates.
The national unemployment rate ticked higher in October from 7.2% to 7.3%.
The markets initially sold off after the report was released, but ramped higher throughout the course of the day.
While the non-farm payrolls were higher than expected, there were a number of troubling data points in the report, including:
-civilian labor force dropped by 720,000 people in October
-labor force participation rate dropped 0.4% to 62.8%
-number of employed Americans dropped by 735,000 to 143,568,000
-number of unemployed Americans increased by 17,000 to 11,272,000
-number of people "not in the labor force" (this means, a person who is neither employed or officially unemployed) increased by 932,000
-unemployment rate for teenagers increased 0.8% to 22.2%
-U-6 unemployment rate increased by 0.2% to 13.8%
--
The markets seemed to focus on the non-farm payroll number, which resulted in the DJIA, NASDAQ and S&P 500 all turning in great days.
However, the October jobs report certainly contained a great deal of worrying data points that should, at the very least, give people pause.
Source: BLS.gov - The Employment Situation, October 2013
Filed under: General Knowledge