Well, that was disappointing

Payroll employment up 39,000 in November (private sector employment up 50,000). Well below what I and the rest of the world thought it would be.

Here's how we respond to news like this in the economics profession. First we identify the deviation of data from theory as a "puzzle." We give this puzzle a really cool name: Feldstein-Horioka, Equity Premium, Black Swan. We write a paper presenting our theory and show that the data massively contradict it. We title the paper something like "The November Effect in Payroll Employment: A Puzzle." Then we sit back as hundreds of tenure-seeking assistant professors publish papers that seek to explain this puzzle (the goal being to do so with the minimum number of adjustments to our theory), citing our original paper prominently in the process.

Or I suppose we could wait until next month when the BLS revises the number upwards by 100,000 or so.