The US labor market surprised with positive developments in October.

Unemployment continued to decline, while employment rose significantly.

The US Federal Reserve is likely to see confirmation of its course of scaling back its extremely loose monetary policy somewhat.

The US economy created 531,000 jobs outside of agriculture, the Department of Labor announced in Washington on Friday. Analysts had expected a lower increase of an average of 450,000 jobs. In addition, the job creation in the two previous months was corrected upwards by a total of 235,000 jobs. The labor market collapsed during the Corona crisis, but has now recovered significantly. However, the job market is still a long way from full employment, as it was before the outbreak of the crisis.

Unemployment continued to decline.

The unemployment rate fell compared to the previous month by 0.2 percentage points to 4.6 percent.

Analysts had expected an average of a decline to just 4.7 percent.

The number of unemployed fell to 7.4 million, according to the ministry.

That is much less than was recorded after the coronavirus pandemic attacked the United States.

The pre-crisis level has not yet been reached: In February 2020 the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent.

At that time that corresponded to about 5.7 million unemployed.

Meanwhile, wages rose as expected.

The average hourly wages increased by 0.4 percent compared to the previous month, compared to the same month last year they rose by 4.9 percent.

Wage growth has accelerated noticeably in the past few months.

After the data on the dollar, the euro came under pressure and the stock markets posted significant gains.

The Dax climbed to a new record high.