The October jobs report landed Friday with numbers that the consensus hadn’t expected.
U.S. employers added 165,000 jobs in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly release. The figure came in well above the roughly 65,000 that economists surveyed by Dow Jones had anticipated. The Labor Department also revised August and September figures upward by a combined 84,000 jobs, which means the economy added more work in those months than the initial reports had suggested. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1 percent from 4.2 percent the month before. Average hourly earnings rose 0.4 percent for the month.
The sectors doing the most hiring in October were professional and business services at 70,000 jobs, health care at 42,000, transportation and warehousing at 25,000, and manufacturing at 19,000. The broader unemployment measure, U-6, which counts people working part time who want full-time work and workers who’ve stopped looking entirely, rose from 7.6 to 7.9 percent. That includes 4.8 million Americans who are working but want more hours (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The headline and the fuller picture don’t always point the same direction, and they don’t here.
Ten-year Treasury yields moved higher after the report. The Federal Reserve meets in December, and a hiring number this strong puts a rate hike back on the table.
In 1994, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan raised rates seven times in twelve months when the economy was adding jobs at a comparable pace. The bond market rout that followed slowed growth but didn’t produce a recession. That sequence is the template most analysts reach for in a moment like this. The difference today is that in 1994 the United States wasn’t running a hot war in the Persian Gulf with energy prices running roughly 35 percent above their pre-conflict baseline. The Fed’s calculation in December involves the jobs number, yes, but it also involves an oil market that hasn’t normalized and a ceasefire timeline that nobody has reliably predicted.
(Axios reported the October jobs figures on Friday.)
Iran and the United States are closer to a framework agreement than at any point since the conflict began in February, Bloomberg reported Friday, with the nuclear program now a formal part of what any deal would need to address.
Earlier rounds of Qatar-mediated discussion focused on a military ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. This week, Iranian officials put forward a plan that would link Strait access to the restart of formal nuclear talks. What Qatar is carrying between the parties is a draft framework, not a final agreement. Iran’s stated conditions include lifting the naval blockade, repealing a tranche of sanctions, and a broader regional ceasefire. Bloomberg’s Friday reporting didn’t suggest those conditions had been accepted. It suggested that both sides are working from the same draft rather than parallel ones, which is a different thing than agreement, but it’s not nothing.
Vice President Vance has spent roughly two weeks leading the administration’s quiet internal push for a negotiated settlement, Axios has reported. The administration has also maintained publicly that it is prepared to escalate militarily if talks fail. Those two stances have coexisted through most of the conflict.
The 2015 nuclear agreement took more than two years of formal negotiation and ran 159 pages (Business Standard). The Trump administration withdrew from it in 2018. What’s being discussed now is structurally different: a ceasefire framework with nuclear components attached, not a comprehensive nonproliferation treaty. How durable any such agreement would be, and whether Congress would approve its terms, aren’t questions the current conversations settle. What Friday’s reporting indicates is that the two countries are in the same conversation about what a full package might include, which is further along than they were a week ago.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced his bid for Speaker of the House on Wednesday, one day after Democrats won control of both chambers in Tuesday’s midterms (Fox News).
With Democrats projected to hold at least 235 House seats, Jeffries has the numbers inside his own caucus. A Democratic leadership team vote is scheduled for mid-December. The floor vote for Speaker takes place when the 120th Congress is seated in January, and that vote requires 218 of 435 members. At 235 seats, Democrats can lose seventeen votes on the floor and still win. That margin isn’t wide.
Jeffries has represented Brooklyn’s Eighth Congressional District since 2013. He became House Democratic Leader in 2022 when Nancy Pelosi stepped aside after the midterm losses that year. If the January floor vote holds, he’d become the first Black Speaker of the House in American history.
Democrats swept both chambers in the 1958 midterm (U.S. House History). The spring recession and the late years of the Eisenhower presidency combined to produce a 49-seat Democratic gain in the House and 15 in the Senate. Sam Rayburn, who had held the gavel since 1955, kept the chair (U.S. House History). He held it until his death in November 1961. The circumstances of 1958 and 2026 don’t map cleanly onto each other. What the two elections share is the basic dynamic of a midterm that served as a verdict on the party in the White House and produced a congressional majority that arrived in Washington with a list. Whether that list survives contact with the other chamber is a different question from whether the list exists. In January, the list will exist.
(Fox News reported that Jeffries declared his bid for Speaker. CNBC reported Democrats were projected to win at least 235 House seats.)
Three days before the peace talks are scheduled to begin, the positions of the parties haven’t moved.
U.S. and Russian delegations, joined by Ukrainian representatives, are set to meet in Abu Dhabi on November 10 and 11. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will represent the United States. Russia’s Vladimir Medinsky, formerly the country’s culture minister for eight years before becoming a close Putin aide, will head the Russian delegation. This is the fourth formal round since January and the first trilateral session since February, when talks broke down after Ukrainian forces launched a cross-border incursion into Belgorod Oblast.
Russia’s stated position going into Abu Dhabi: Ukrainian territorial concessions in the four oblasts Russia claims and a permanent bar on Ukrainian NATO membership. Ukraine’s position, restated by President Zelensky this week: any settlement must reflect current lines of control rather than Russian territorial claims and must include external security guarantees. Those two positions haven’t been bridged. No one close to the talks has said they expect a breakthrough next week.
The 1973 Paris Peace Accords offer a parallel worth examining carefully. Negotiations for that agreement ran four years while fighting continued. The ceasefire the accords established was violated from the day it took effect (History News Network). American forces withdrew as the terms required. The war continued until 1975. What the Paris process produced was an exit for one of the parties, not a peace for the others. Abu Dhabi has a different structure: active American involvement on both the military and diplomatic sides, the UAE in a mediating role, and Ukrainian representation at the table alongside the two larger powers. Whether those differences produce a different outcome depends on something none of the parties has yet demonstrated across any session: a shared interest in an agreement that holds rather than one that buys time.
(Axios reported the confirmed Abu Dhabi session. US News confirmed the Kremlin’s announcement.)
Something good.
California’s State Water Resources Control Board approved the final water right permit for the Sites Reservoir on Thursday, clearing the last major regulatory hurdle for what state officials are calling the largest new reservoir construction project in California in more than fifty years. The reservoir is located north of Sacramento in Colusa County. When full, it would hold up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water. Construction can now begin.
California’s water infrastructure was largely built in the 1950s and 1960s, designed for a population and a climate that have both changed considerably since the planning documents were drawn. Shasta Dam was completed in 1945. Oroville Dam finished in 1968. For the five decades since, California has managed its water supply primarily through conservation requirements, groundwater banking, and water transfers between districts. Those tools have worked, imperfectly, through several severe drought cycles. The Sites project has been in planning and permitting for more than fifteen years, moving through environmental review, legislative authorization, and state and federal permitting processes.
What Thursday’s approval produced isn’t water. The reservoir doesn’t exist yet. What it produced is the authorization to build it, which fifteen years of planning had not yet secured.
There are two ways to tell this story. One focuses on how long it took and what that delay cost. That version is accurate. The other focuses on what Thursday morning was: the first day that a gap in California’s water storage capacity, a gap that has existed since before most of the state’s current residents were born, can legally begin to close. Those two stories aren’t in conflict. The permit is both.
(The California Governor’s Office announced the permit approval on November 5, 2026.)
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
