Australian labour market report for October, the 'headline' is the 'employment change' and also the unemployment rate

Employment Change: +3.7K ... miss

  • expected 18.8K, prior 26.6K revised from 19.8K .... nice!

Unemployment Rate: 5.4% ... beat

  • expected 5.5%, prior 5.5%
  • At 5.4% its lowest since February of 2013

Full Time Employment Change: +24.3K ... a great result for full time work

  • prior was +9.3K, revised up from +6.1K

Part Time Employment Change: -20.7K

  • prior was +17.3K, revised up from +13.7K

Participation Rate: 65.1 %, slips from previous month

  • expected 65.2%, prior was 65.2%

'Trend' figures to come (the above are the seasonally adjusted which is the immediate focus of the market) ... The ABS says:

  • Trend series smooth the more volatile seasonally adjusted estimates and provide the best measure of the underlying behaviour of the labour market.
  • The monthly trend unemployment rate remained at 5.5 per cent
  • Monthly trend full-time employment increased for the 13th straight month in October 2017
  • Full-time employment grew by a further 16,000 persons in October
  • Part-time employment increased by 4,000 persons
  • "Full-time employment has now increased by around 289,000 persons since October 2016, and makes up the majority of the 347,000 person net increase in employment over the period," Chief Economist for the ABS, Bruce Hockman, said."Over the past year, trend employment increased by 2.9 per cent, which is above the average year-on-year growth over the past 20 years (1.9 per cent)."
  • participation rate remained at 65.2 per cent for a second month, the highest it has been since April 2012
  • The trend monthly hours worked increased by 3.5 million hours (0.2 per cent), with the annual figure also showing strong growth (3.1 per cent)

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Oftentimes a good labour market report will be greeted by the moaners with "but full-time declined!" That's not gonna fly this month, and even last month's was revised higher. I don't expect any of them will laud this though.

Still, there is something to moan about, yes the unemployment dropped, but so did the participation rate, something to whine about on those whiny forums.
;-)

Meanwhile AUD is little changed. It had a wobble but is now a few points only from levels prevailing prior to the data release.

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Earlier this week, more data: