Yesterday I treated the August JOLTS print like the first polite admission that the labor-market juice is wearing off. Openings fell to 7.079 million. Construction and health care blinked. I wrote that if the next payrolls print came in soft, nobody should act surprised.

Today’s numbers did not play along.

ADP says private employers added 90,000 jobs in September. That is a rebound from August’s 38,000 and above the Wall Street mark around 68–73k. Construction hired. Manufacturing hired. Education and health care did the heavy lifting. Finance and professional services were the ones that actually looked tired.

Same morning, BEA dropped August Personal Income and Outlays — with the annual revisions attached. Real consumer spending rose 0.6 percent. Nominal spending jumped 0.9 percent. Core PCE, the Fed’s pet inflation gauge, rose 0.2 percent on the month and 3.0 percent from a year earlier. Headline PCE was 0.3 percent and 3.4 percent. Cooler year-over-year than the 3.7 / 3.3-ish consensus, partly because BEA rewrote history back to 2021, not because America suddenly became Japan.

So let’s be precise about what I got wrong.

I used a stock of unfilled jobs at the end of August to preview a flow of September hiring. That is a sloppy shortcut. Openings can fall because firms stop posting or because they finally fill the seats. JOLTS can look thinner while ADP still prints a decent month. I said I was not pretending one print proved the whole argument — and then I went and previewed the next payrolls anyway. That last sentence was the miss. Own it.

What still stands is narrower and slower. A 256,000 drop in openings is not a collapse, and BLS was right to stamp it “little changed.” Quits and layoffs stayed dull. The immigration-and-breakeven story is a 2026 path, not a 48-hour trading call. One stronger ADP month after a weak one does not restore the old surge of bodies. It just means September did not send the invoice I advertised.

Friday’s official payrolls can still disagree with ADP. They usually do, a little. Until then the scoreboard is simple: the help-wanted signs got quieter in August, and the actual paychecks in September did not.

Read the original, mistakes and all: The juice is wearing off. The job openings just admitted it.

How I actually sit in this market: How a Swede buys the U.S. market

If Friday’s NFP comes in hot, I will not pretend yesterday’s line was “directionally correct.” If it comes in soft, I still needed today to say the preview was early.