It's like the jobs report got stuck in a storm rendering the ink illegible.

I'm David Brancaccio.

First, the headline is that the number of people on payrolls hardly increased at all

September to October.

The closely watched number was up by just 12,000 when we've come to expect maybe 100 or

150,000 higher a month.

But experts say that's largely the effect of the

strike by Boeing machinists and the two terrible hurricanes. For those looking for underlying

trends, more attention is on today's big revisions of the two months prior, but take care

with that as well. Christopher Lowe is the chief economist at FHN Financial.

Normally you see 112,000 downward revision and you think that that is enormous.

But remember where the revisions come from. They come from companies reporting late and fastest growing part of the country is the southeast, and there were a lot of companies that,

you know, obviously had better things, more pressing things to do than fill out surveys. So I

think even the revisions were probably affected by these storms. So you see a lot of human

heartache in this report, but in terms of telling us where the labor

market is going, is not a lot here.

No, we have to wait and see. But that said, we have a Fed meeting next week, two days after the

election. And the Fed gave pretty clear guidance that they are likely to cut again next week.

That won't be affected by this report

one way or the other.

Christopher Lowe, Chief Economist, FHN Financial. Thank you.

Thank you, David.

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