Growth misses We got our first read on 3rd quarter GDP this week and it came in a little weaker than expectations. The US economy grew 2% (vs expectations for a 2.8% print) with growth being slightly hampered by the slowing housing market, supply chain issues (I actually saw a Halloween costume related to this, it was hilarious), and a deceleration in consumer spending during the delta wave. The government’s COVID-related benefits also came to an end in September, decreasing the government spending component of GDP. Moral of the story: The initial expectation for 3rd quarter economic growth was much higher this summer before some of the structural issues (delta wave, broken supply chain, etc.)…

Inflation is making itself at home  The Consumer Price Index posted a 5.4% increase in September compared to the same time last year, and up 0.4% from August. Yay for at 30-year high levels and wildly higher than the Fed’s 2% average target. Excluding food and energy, core inflation came in at 4%, which has normalized a bit since hitting its high in June at 4.3%. This is coming as prices for producers increased 8.6% for the month of September, likely the highest reading for producer prices since the early 1980s. Prices are rising pretty much across every product category – supply chain bottlenecks are basically clogging up the economy…

Jobs report  We knew the delta variant was going to create some chaos in the labor market for the month of September, but economists were still expecting us to create about 500k jobs during the month. In a super unfortunate turn of events, we only created 194k new jobs in September. A big part of this was driven by government jobs declining 123k, which means private sector jobs increased by 317k. That isn’t horrible but also not a great look. The leisure and hospitality industry, which has been leading job gains through most the year was at the top of the leaderboard again, creating 74k new jobs for the month. Even though…