The unemployment rate held up pretty well after a month of bashing by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Greenspan, and the business press. It went from 4.9% to 5.1%. Of course, these kinds of disruptions can lead to significant revisions to data in later months, but so far, it is encouraging. The first line of the Bureau of Labor Statistics release was hilarious: “Nonfarm payroll employment was little changed (-35,000) in September.” If this was an election year, that kind of decline would have been blown way out of proportion in the press. Thankfully, this is not a year divisible by four where the business press, already deficient in its economic reporting, takes a sharp turn downward.

The household survey was remarkably strong, down only -17,000. The net new businesses data I track hit its highest level ever, with an average of more than 73,900 net new businesses per month for the last year.

Alan Greenspan kept making noises about “speculative excesses,” indicating that the Fed was very concerned about inflation. The St. Louis Fed Monetary Base took a jump up of more than 6% after some very lackluster readings (lackluster was good, because that’s what the Fed was looking for). They’re going to keep raising rates, and there is seemingly no end in sight for them to stop. Recent increases haven’t even worked their way through the system yet. They will levy those increases, and then it will be realized that the Fed overtightened.