You just have to love the stock market and its schizophrenic behavior around the payrolls reports from the U.S. Department of Labor. No matter how you cut it, the employment situation took a serious turn to the south for those hoping for endless U.S. growth and hoping for a rate hike sooner rather than later. A weaker jobs report would have been great three months ago, but now they want a rate hike, so a weak number pushes the impetus of that farther out.

The Labor Department reported on Friday that unemployment stood flat at an official 5.1%. That sounds great on the surface, but the nonfarm payrolls grew by a mere 142,000 in the month of September. Bloomberg was calling for a gain of some 203,000, and the range from Econoday’s pool of economists was 180,000 to 235,000. That is bad all around, and on top off the bad news trend the report from August’s nonfarm payrolls was revised down to 136,000 from the preliminary figure of 173,000.

Things were just as bad on the private sector payrolls. September added only 118,000 jobs in the private sector. Like nonfarm payrolls, the August reading was revised far lower as well, down to 100,000 from 140,000.

Wage inflation, another hoped for increase, disappointed with a reading of 0.0%, versus the Bloomberg consensus of 0.2%. At least August’s preliminary figure of a 0.3% gain was revised higher to 0.4%. Another minor weak report was that the average work week dropped down to 34.5 hours in September from 34.6 hours in August.

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Jobs in manufacturing were weak, as were mining (think oil). Retail and professional and business services were continued strong sectors. The first thing that comes to mind is that this pushes out the hopes for a rate hike, taking October off the table. Now we just have to wait for December and hope for better data that seems elusive. Here is what Bloomberg’s summary said on the matter:

Forget about an October rate hike and maybe forget about a December one too. The September employment report came in weaker than expected on all scores with nonfarm payroll at 142,000, well under the low estimate for 180,000. To seal the matter, downward revisions to the two prior months total 59,000. Average hourly earnings also came in below the low end estimate, at an unchanged reading and a year-on-year rate of 2.2 percent which is also unchanged. And the labor market is shrinking! The labor participation fell 2 tenths to a nearly 40 year low of 62.4 percent.

Stocks were handily higher before the payrolls data release, but then stocks tanked with no snap-back recovery seen in the minutes before the open. Both the Dow was down more than 200 points and S&P 500 was down 26 points after about a half hour of trading. Maybe a more formal retest of August’s lows really is in the works.

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