First Round Of October Jobs Numbers Is Strong

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 2, 8:01AM EDT

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The first set of numbers the market watches to forecast October unemployment come from Challenger Gray. The figure for last month was strong. If they are confirmed by figures from ADP, the official government figures for October, issued on Friday, should be the best of the year.

“After reaching a 28-month high in September, the number of planned job cuts announced by U.S.-based employers plunged in October to 42,759, the lowest monthly total since June. Meanwhile, planned hiring announcements approached 160,000, as several employers revealed their seasonal employment strategies”, the research firm reported.

Layoffs at banks and financial firms are the Achilles Heel of job recovery in the private sector as announcements from both US and overseas banks have shown recently.

“The government and financial sectors still remain the top job-cutting industries for the year, with 162,373 and 54,510 job cuts, respectively.”

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.