WSJ’s Sudeep Reddy offers a rundown of what market watchers should pay attention to in this particularly jobs report: 
 
 Jobless Rate, Payrolls and Revisions 
 
 The consensus forecast among economists, based on a Dow Jones Newswires survey, puts the unemployment rate unchanged at 7.3% in September and the payroll gain at 180,000 jobs for the month. That would be a slight (but insignificant) increase from the 169,000 jobs added in August and pretty close to the gains of the past year. The revisions could be as important as the headline figure for September. The latest figures show a gain of just 104,000 jobs in July. Downward revisions to prior months, along with a weaker-than-expected reading for September, could fuel speculation about whether businesses were growing more cautious due to interest-rate volatility, talk of war in Syria (remember that?) or the approaching Washington dysfunction. 
 
 For the numbers geeks among us, the team at CRT Capital Group offers this trivia: The first snapshot of September payrolls has a statistical tendency to come in lower than expected 69% of the time, with an average miss of 89,000 jobs off the consensus. For the other 31% of the time it comes in higher than expected, the average upward surprise is 54,000 jobs. 
 
 Shutdown Effects 
 
 Sorry, you’ll probably need to wait a month to see any obvious effects of the shutdown in the employment data. It’s conceivable that the run-up to the shutdown could have influenced the September data. One survey of businesses showed the shutdown and debt-ceiling fight weighing on hiring plans as early as September. A more recent survey showed executives slashing hiring expectations as well. But all of that will be tough to see in Tuesday’s data. It could take months to know whether those effectsturn out to be small and short-lived or something more meaningful driven by the recent drop in confidence. 
 
 Fed Implications 
 
 Unless the jobs report shows an extreme surprise in either direction, this isn’t a jobs report that will move the needle for the Federal Reserve’s decision at its Oct. 29-30 meeting. Officials have already signaled that the shutdown has muddied economic data too much for a data-dependent central bank to make any immediate decisions. 
 
 But Fed officials will be watching closely to assess the labor market’s development and decide whether to hint at a potential change in policy before the year is out. The latest Wall Street Journal survey of economists, conducted in the early days of the shutdown, showed most forecasters betting on a December or January reduction in the Fed’s $85 billion bond-buying program. Some traders and economists, however, already are pushing their expectations down to March. 
 
 Does ‘Jobs Tuesday’ Sound Unnatural? Yes. 
 
 The longest U.S. government shutdown on record, covering a three-week stretch from December 1995 to January 1996, delayed the jobs report by a couple of weeks. But the Labor Department still released it on a Friday: January 19, 1996. Even if the September employment data proves to be forgettable, a generation of economics reporters will never forget their first — and only, we hope — Jobs Tuesday. ||||| Look at that graph. There's nothing all that amazing, or all that weird, about this month's numbers. 
 
 We've hit that moment in the election when people begin to lose their minds. Case in point, within minutes of the jobs report, Twitter filled with Republicans claiming the books were somehow cooked, the numbers aren't real, etc. 
 
 Let's take a deep breath. Jobs reports are about the economy, not about the election. Confusing the two leads to very bad analysis. 
 
 This is a good jobs report in a still-weak economy. The 114,000 jobs we added in September aren't very impressive. The revisions to the last two months, which added 86,000 jobs to the total, were much more impressive. Those revisions also suggest that September's jobs could get revised up -- or, of course, down. So be careful about reading too much into that number. Still, these are, at best, good, not great, numbers. 
 
 The controversy, if it's worth using that word, is over the unemployment rate, which dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. That's three-tenths of one percent. That's what all the fuss is about. 
 
 Let's get one thing out of the way: The data was not, as Jack Welch suggested in a now-infamous tweet, manipulated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is set up to ensure the White House has no ability to influence it. As labor economist Betsey Stevenson wrote, "anyone who thinks that political folks can manipulate the unemployment data are completely ignorant of how the BLS works and how the data are compiled." Plus, if the White House somehow was manipulating the data, don't you think they would have made the payroll number look a bit better than 114,000? No one would have batted an eye at 160,000. 
 
 The fact is that there's not much that needs to be explained here. We've seen drops like this -- and even drops bigger than this -- before. Between July and August the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent -- two-tenths of one percent. November-December of 2011 also saw a .2 percent drop. November-December of 2010 saw a .4 percent drop. This isn't some incredible aberration. The fact that the unemployment rate broke under the psychologically important 8 percent line is making this number feel bigger to people than it really is. 
 
 The number could, of course, be wrong. The household survey is, well, a survey, which means it's open to error. But the internals back it up. The number saying they had jobs increased by about 800,000. That seems high, but it's counting 582,000 who say they got part-time jobs*. 
 
 There's precedent for this. As Daniel Indiviglio notes, part-time jobs increased by 579,000 in September 2010 and by 483,000 in September 2011. It might simply be seasonal hiring. You don't need to resort to ridiculous theories like Democrats across the country suddenly deciding to lie to surveytakers in order to help Obama. 
 
 Which leads to another argument: That U6, the broadest measure of labor-market pain, didn't move, which should make us skeptical of the fact that U3, the normal unemployment rate, did move. That's just misunderstanding what U6 is. 
 
 
 
 
 
 U6 is not an unemployment measure. It includes part-time workers who want full-time work. So it doesn't count the increase in part-time work. But every measure of actual unemployment -- U1, U2, U3, U4, and U5 -- went down. You can see them all here. Again, there's no mystery. 
 
 This is an encouraging report. What it tells us is that the labor market has been a bit better over the last few months than we thought, and that the recovery hasn't slowed in the ways we feared. What the response to it tells us is that the election is driving people a little bit crazy. 
 
 *Correction: The number of part-time jobs did not increase. I was looking at table A8, which counts part-time workers who want to be full time. That rose, as I wrote, by about 580,000 jobs, and explains why U6 held steady. But the right table for net part-time workers is A9, and that actually fell slightly, which means the rise in employment came from full-time jobs -- which, assuming it's more than just sampling error, is great! More details here.
– The unemployment rate ticked down from 5.9% to 5.8% last month, its lowest level since July 2008, the AP reports. And 214,000 jobs were added; 233,000 had been expected, per the Wall Street Journal's forecast, with the unemployment rate expected to stick at 5.9%. August and September numbers were also revised upward: August saw 203,000 new jobs added (up from 180,000), and September saw 256,000 (up from 248,000). That means the economy has added 200,000 or more jobs per month for nine consecutive months, the longest stretch since 1995, the AP notes. Even though the new jobs number for October doesn't look great when compared to what was expected, the AP points out that it extends "the healthiest pace of hiring in eight years." And Michael J. Casey at the Journal explains why today's jobs report is actually pretty good news: "Unemployment dropped, including in the U-6 broader measure of joblessness. And it came with a higher participation rate. Along with the upward revision in the September payrolls number, all of this means the net takeaway ain't as bad as the headline jobs number suggests."