The labor market looks considerably healthier than it did at the start of the summer.

: Friday morning's jobs report recast the last two months as a period of modest job growth rather than of outright deterioration, capped by a gain last month that was more than triple what economists expected.

: "August turned the heat back up on the job market," Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao wrote Friday morning.

econ

The labor market looks considerably healthier than it did at the start of the summer.

**Why it matters**: Friday morning's jobs report recast the last two months as a period of modest job growth rather than of outright deterioration, capped by a gain last month that was more than triple what economists expected.

* The labor market is weathering the Iran conflict and an AI-driven transformation of the economy with surprisingly little damage, at least for now.
* For the Federal Reserve, the report puts inflation even more squarely in focus — with less evidence that the labor market is too fragile to hold up in the event of higher interest rates.

**What they're saying**: "August turned the heat back up on the job market," Glassdoor chief economist Daniel Zhao wrote Friday morning.

* But Zhao noted that "the data has swung hard from month to month, and revisions keep rewriting what we thought we knew, so the underlying trend is tough to read."

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