Breaking news: The US labor market’s slowing.

A dearth of tradable narratives during Tuesday’s bond market holiday in the US amplified ADP’s weekly update on “real-time” private sector hiring.

Recall that in addition to its monthly tally, ADP’s now publishing a four-week moving average of private sector job creation every Tuesday, an effort to “provide a directional indicator of the labor market” on a more timely basis, as they put it.

As the figure shows, that average fell sharply in the four weeks ended October 25 to reflect an average of 11,250 lost jobs per week.

The US labor market, ADP chief economist Nela Richardson remarked, “struggled to produce jobs consistently” during the second half of last month.

She cautioned that the data’s preliminary and may be revised, but that didn’t stop the peanut gallery from jeering at the (admittedly glaring) discrepancy with the monthly tally, which suggested employers added 42,000 jobs in October.

I mention this not because it’s surprising — recall that both of last week’s other updates on the US labor market strongly suggested the hiring impulse is tepid on good days and nonexistent on all the others — but rather because this release is likely to garner more attention going forward, so we may as well get in the habit.

Meanwhile, Goldman said the US economy probably shed jobs on net in October once you account for that cursed deferred resignation program inaugurated when Elon Musk was briefly president earlier this year.

The chart doesn’t show the decline. Rather, it shows the signal from the bank’s “job growth nowcast” (everyone has a “nowcast” for everything) not including the impact of the delayed resignations plotted with the NFP 3-month moving average.

“Our updated job growth tracker slowed to 50k/month from 85k/month in September but remained above its stagnant pace of the summer,” the bank’s Elsie Peng and Ronnie Walker wrote, in an update that spanned a dozen pages.

“While government hiring trends are typically not consequential for the overall job growth outlook, they have been this year,” Peng and Walker went on, adding that federal payrolls are down about 100,000 in 2025. “The end of the government deferred resignation program will likely pose a drag on October payrolls,” they said. “Taken together, we expect official nonfarm payrolls to show a 50,000 decline in October.”

The good news is, the Senate bill to end the longest US government funding lapse on record included a provision that reverses Russ Vought’s shutdown layoffs, so those won’t be a further drag. Don’t fear The Reaper after all.