Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by Nidig and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, December 4th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap.

Now, this week will be a true weekly recap. We're going to go through a bunch of topics that I didn't have a chance to cover during the week.

And we're going to start with maybe the key macro discussion

of the last couple days, which is the November payrolls. Each month, for those of you who

aren't familiar, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases non-farm payroll changes for the month

before. It's a great chance to look at the labor side of the economy, and the markets follow it

pretty closely. Last month, November, was kind of a

mixed bag. On the one hand, the unemployment rate fell to 4.2%, which is obviously good, and what the

Federal Reserve is looking to see. But at the same time, we added the smallest number of jobs this

year, just 210,000. Many economists had expected that number to be closer to 550,000, which is a fairly

significant miss. Labor Force participation edged up slightly to 61.8%. And all in all, these mixed

signals mean that although job growth might be disappointing, this report doesn't really have anything in it that would

change the Federal Reserve's current taper trajectory. Remember, the Fed has dual mandates, and right now

those mandates are dueling. On the one hand, they have price and market stability. They have to be

concerned about inflation. That mandate is pointing to more hawkish policy, a taper of bond purchases and potentially

a willingness to let interest rates go up a little bit. On the other hand is the maximum employment

mandate, and that has been driving the reason that they've kept policy so dovish throughout the year.

Given that the jobs reports keep missing, those two mandates are pointing in potentially

different directions,

...