On the first Friday of October I laid out the somewhat good news on employment and unemployment for September. This Friday (today), the news is fantastic!

1. The number of people employed increased by 2.243 million. A typical increase in normal times is between 0.2 and 0.3 million, so this is 7 to 10 times as large.

2. The employment to population ratio increased from 56.6 percent to 57.4 percent, a large increase.

3. The number of people unemployed fell from 12.580 million to 11.061 million, a drop of 1.519 million.

4. The unemployment rate fell from 7.9 percent to 6.9 percent.

5. The unemployment rate for people in every single category: black, white, men, women, teenagers, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino, fell. For many of those groups it fell by more than 1 percentage point.

The above are all data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey.

The data from the establishment survey are also good, especially in the details.

1. Private employment rose by 906,000.

2. Leisure and hospitality, one of the sectors hardest hit by both the pandemic and the lockdowns, rose by 208,000.

3. Government employment fell by 268,000.