Even for the most avid Fed watchers, it was easy to get distracted this week. The market pushed and pulled on the prospects for an additional coronavirus relief bill. It digested the first Presidential debate and the news of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump testing positive for COVID-19.

Nevertheless, the Labor Department released the September jobs report this morning and the economy added about 660,000 jobs this month. In August it added about 1.5 million jobs. In June it added about 4.8 million. And while some job growth is better than no job growth, the takeaway is that pace of the economic recovery has slowed. The unemployment rate fell from 8.4% in August to 7.9% in September.

At this point, a “U” shaped economic recovery can be definitively ruled out. However, it is still too early to deem the recovery a true “V”. And the prospects for an “inverse square root” recovery, or a “V” and then morphs into a “u” could be gaining steam.

We are still about 10.7 million jobs short of the pre-COVID February employment levels. And this week, Economist Ernie Tedeschi highlighted that even at September’s pace, which is not guaranteed to persist as the recovery has been slowing, it would take us about 17 months to recover to February’s...

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