My guess would be September’s US labor market report, released on Friday, will be remembered as “peak jobs” for this cycle.

That’s not to suggest a recession is imminent, it’s just to say the labor market is typically a lagging indicator and even if you’re overtly upbeat on the economy, you’ll surely concede that 5% rates (and long-end yields) are a headwind. Worn out and clichéd as they are, narratives around diminished savings buffers, drag from the resumption of student loan payments for millions of lower- and middle-income households and exhaustion after two years of high inflation, are all significant hurdles for consumers going forward.

The consumption impulse is just demand, and demand is ultimately what drives hiring. Job gains were obviously robust in the initial read for September NFP, and the upward revisions to the prior two months’ figures likewise argued for a still resilient labor market, but there were (at least) three notable caveats.

First, the household print was far more pedestrian than the headline.

86,000 might even be described as lackluster. Of course, the household survey is erratic, and nobody trades off it.

Second, hours worked were unchanged, and the drop from the highs still sticks out.

The trend there is reminiscent of the lead up to the GFC, although the situation has stabilized in recent months.

Third, and most importantly, average hourly earnings for “regular economic people” (to employ Jerome Powell’s vernacular) posted the smallest back-to-back monthly gains in three years.

That, as both the MoM and YoY topline AHE prints came in cooler-than-expected.

Obviously, none of that will matter for the Fed’s calculus in the very near-term. For their part, investors see all of the above, but as I put it Friday morning, editorializing around the blockbuster headline, “336,000 with meaningful upward revisions is a pretty high bar to clear when it comes to fading an NFP release.” Markets never trade on discrepancies between the establishment survey and the household survey, even if they should.

ING’s James Knightley captured it pretty well. There were “some crumbs for the doves, but ‘higher-for-longer’ remains the theme,” he wrote.