What's going on?

Looks like Americans have been keeping busy to distract themselves from one thing and another: the US economy added a higher-than-expected 638,000 jobs last month (tweet this).

What does this mean?

The number of new hires is one of the best ways to see how an economy�s actually doing, so it bodes well that there are plenty of US businesses � particularly those in leisure, retail, and hospitality � bringing laid-off workers back into the fold. That takes the overall unemployment rate to 6.9%, down from 7.9% last month. But let�s not lose sight of the bigger picture here: there are still about 10 million more people looking for work than there were before the pandemic, while the number of long-term unemployed (i.e. those without a job for 27 weeks or more) climbed to almost 4 million � the most since 2014.

Why should I care?

The bigger picture: Word salad.

The US Federal Reserve (the Fed) said late last week that while the country�s economy has �continued to recover�, it�s still a long way off where it was. That�s more of a hedge than the central bank�s position last month, when it said economic activity had �picked up�. Tomayto, tomahto, you might think, but the language the Fed uses is important: investors watch it closely to see if it signals an upcoming tweak to its policies. In this case? There�s so much up in the air that it�s not clear what it signaled. So yep: tomayto tomahto.

For markets: Poll position.

Investors only cared about one thing last week: politics. The US election caused a whole heap of turmoil in the stock market, with investors too focused on what the post-election world would look like to think about a company�s fundamentals. And overall, they seemed to think that post-election world looks pretty good indeed: the US stock market rallied higher this week, inching closer to the all-time highs it reached in September.