The Economy Added 29,000 Jobs. Gold Is Back Above $4,200 and Still Down on the Month.

The U.S. economy added 29,000 jobs in September. The average over the prior year is 45,000. That’s the government’s own number, and it’s the kind of figure that makes a central banker reach for the antacids.

Gold noticed. It climbed back above $4,200 an ounce on Friday.

What the Report Actually Said

The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the unemployment rate at 4.2%, where it has hovered in a narrow band since March. Health care added 17,000 jobs, construction 11,000, manufacturing 9,000. Financial activities lost 7,000.

The quiet part is the revisions. July got marked down from a gain of 21,000 to a loss of 10,000. August was cut from 162,000 to 133,000. Wall Street had been braced for something better than 29,000, and then the past got worse too.

Wages cooled as well. Average hourly earnings are up 3.0% over twelve months. Trading Economics calls that the slowest pace since May 2021.

Why Gold Cares

Gold has been trading the Fed’s hiking odds for weeks, not the headlines. A soft labor market is the best argument against another hike, and the market treated it that way. Trading Economics put October hike odds near 20% by Friday’s close (Reuters had about 22%), down from about 70% earlier in the week, with December still above 70%.

Read that twice. The market didn’t say the Fed is done. It said the Fed can wait a few weeks. That’s a delay, not a pivot.

The Number That Keeps This in Perspective

Fortune had gold at $4,218 at 9 a.m. ET, up from $4,177 a day earlier. A month ago it was $4,334. So you’re looking at a decent bounce inside a bigger slide.

Silver tells the same story. It was $61.51 at 9:10 a.m. ET, up from $61.07 yesterday and down from $65.32 a month ago. Still $14.53 above where it sat a year ago. Both metals are up on the year and sore on the month.

One bad jobs report doesn’t reverse a trend. I’ve been burned enough times chasing a single data point to know that.

The Bottom Line

If you stack on a schedule, today changes nothing about your schedule. You’re buying at a price roughly 3% below where gold sat a month ago, and that’s a fact, not a signal.

What to watch is simple. The Fed meets later this month, and December hike odds above 70% are doing the real work in this market. If the next batch of data keeps softening, that number is the one that moves.