US Payrolls Grew by 165,000 in October, Complicating Bitcoin's Rate-Cut Bet

The US economy kept hiring. Nonfarm payrolls rose by 165,000 in October, and the unemployment rate barely budged at 4.1%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its November 6 release. Job growth landed in professional and business services, healthcare, and transportation and warehousing — with professional and business services alone adding 70,000, well above its recent monthly average.

That's the number crypto traders are chewing on. Bitcoin just wrapped a rough week, and a sturdy labour market gives the Federal Reserve less reason to rush into rate cuts. Looser policy can make cash and short-duration yield look less tempting, which historically nudges risk appetite — and Bitcoin trades right inside that tide of leverage costs, dollar liquidity and risk-on behaviour.

The fine print matters too. The BLS revised August and September upward by a combined 84,000 jobs, a reminder that the first print is never the final word. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers climbed 0.4% on the month and 3.1% over the past year. Anyone hanging a big market thesis on one headline number is reading a draft, not the story.

Flows tell their own tale. NewsBTC reported that spot Bitcoin ETFs bled $398.6 million in net withdrawals on November 2. Fund numbers show what moved, not why — and a chunk of market commentary has pinned the recent crypto slump on tech-stock swings and shifting rate expectations. Plausible, sure. But correlation doesn't crown a single culprit, especially with leverage, derivatives positioning and crypto-native events all in play.

What's next: inflation releases, fresh payroll revisions and whatever the Fed says publicly. The Fed weighs the whole data set rather than a rigid rule that more jobs equals higher rates, and nothing in Thursday's report hands traders a Bitcoin price target or a guaranteed call on the next policy move.

The storyline to watch is the gap between Bitcoin's network fundamentals and its behaviour as a financial asset. Financial conditions can move the price long before they touch the protocol.