Gold hits fresh all-time high as U.S. government shutdown dents risk appetite

Private sector employment shed 32,000 jobs in September and pay was up 4.5 percent year-over-year according to the September ADP National Employment Report® produced by ADP Research in collaboration with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab ("Stanford Lab"). The ADP National Employment Report is an independent measure of the labor market based on the anonymized weekly payroll data of more than 26 million private-sector employees in the United States. ADP's Pay Insights captures nearly 14.8 million individual pay change observations each month. Together, the jobs report and pay insights use ADP's fine-grained data to provide a representative and high-frequency picture of the private-sector labor market. *(US) SEPT ADP EMPLOYMENT CHANGE: -32K V +51KE; Includes preliminary rebenchmarking of the National Employment Report; Notes U.S. employers have been cautious with hiring - Prior revised lower from +54K to -3K (More at ) Private payrolls declined in September by 32,000 in key ADP report coming amid shutdown data blackout Private payrolls saw their biggest decline in two-and-a-half years during September, a further sign of labor market weakening that compounds the data blackout accompanying the U.S. government shutdown. Companies shed a seasonally adjusted 32,000 jobs during the month, the biggest slide since March 2023, payrolls processing firm ADP reported Wednesday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for an increase of 45,000. In addition to the drop in September, the August payrolls number was revised to a loss of 3,000 from an initially reported increase of 54,000. The report comes as the funding impasse in Washington, D.C. has led to the first government closure since late 2018 int