In setback, U.S. adds only 142000 jobs

And a few worse-than-expected news for the economy is out this hour.

Traders pared bets on a 2015 hike and subsequent increases after the USA reported surprisingly weak labor data for September.

“While it’s always important not to over-react to one single data release, we’ll make an exception in this case”, wrote Paul Ashworth, chief USA economist with Capital Economics.

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of the world economy, the financial markets, the eurozone and business. “The ozone rule announced this week – one of the most costly regulations in history – touches almost every industry and puts many jobs at risk”.

ARNOLD: No, we were thinking this might just be a kind of regular old, boring, much-of-the-same jobs report. It’s powerful in different ways. Worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics lowered previous estimates for August and July, suggesting that the economy is not as strong as statistics made it look during the third quarter of the <strong>yearstrong>. So that was disappointing.

On commodity markets, the November contract for benchmark crude oil advanced 67 cents to US$45.41 a barrel, while the November contract for natural gas added two cents to US$2.45 per thousand cubic feet.

Hawkish St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard doesn’t disappoint his fans, saying the central bank has met its mandate of maximum employment and is closer to its 2% inflation target than commonly thought (he points to the Dallas Fed’s trimmed median inflation gauge reading at 1.7%). The Federal Open Market Committee chose to maintain interest rates near zero at its meeting in September-a decision Mr. Williams called “a close call”-but indicated it was on track to begin raising rates before the end of the year”. There were those revisions. It’ll also show whether workers benefitted from the recovery with higher wages. Usually, that’s not enough to change anything.

Mr. Williams’s views are closely monitored as he is seen as a centrist on the Fed’s policy-making committee. “Taken together, these are signs of a labor market that retains a fair amount of slack and evidence that the Federal Reserve was right not to raise interest rates in September and indeed should not raise them in 2015″.

Williams said in his speech that as the Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and People’s Bank of China use stimulus, it’s helping to boost the USA dollar, which affects the prices of imports and exports and feeds through to inflation.

ARNOLD: Thank you, Renee.