OIL: Oil End of Day Summary: Crude Slightly Higher

• Minister in charge of Canada Post delivering an announcement about its future tomorrow at 1245pm EST.
• Joel Lightbound "will provide details on new measures to address the challenges facing Canada Post and advance its transformation" according to a government news release.
• Postal agency required a CAD1 billion infusion earlier this year after announcing it was running out of cash after years of losses and had a bond payment coming. It has since reported another major loss amid labor disruptions.
• Management has said the losses relate to the decline of letter mail but also federal legislation requiring 5-day-a-week delivery to every address in Canada. Past governments have discussed major service cuts including to rural Canada but backed off because those moves had been seen as widely unpopular.

New survey data from Strength In Numbers/Verasight, analysed by G. Elliot Morris, shows that President Donald Trump's approval rating “is most negative on the issues Americans rate as the most important: prices/inflation (-31), health care (-24), and government funding/social programs (-19).”

• Morris writes, “Of particular note is that this -31 reading for inflation represents an all-time low for Trump, as does his approval on health care… These results underscore Trump’s enduring weakness on pocketbook — the policy domains that have decided the last several U.S. elections. Trump’s disadvantage on the issue goes a long way to explaining Democrats’ current lead on the generic ballot.”
• On the US House generic ballot, Morris notes, “Democrats lead 47% to 42% among U.S. adults (11% undecided). Among people who say they are definitely or very likely to vote, the margin is 50% to 45%.”

Figure 1: Approval of President Donald Trump on the Following Issues

Source: G. Elliot Morris, Strength In Numbers, Verasight

The Chicago Fed this week officially launched its real-time unemployment rate forecast. 

• The "Advance" Chicago Fed Labor Market Indicators report (it is released twice a month ahead of the nonfarm payrolls report) currently shows a 4.32% unemployment rate for September, which would be unchanged from August (albeit a small decline on an unrounded basis, from 4.324%). The final release will be published on Thursday Oct 3 - the day before the September nonfarm payrolls report.
• The unemployment rate forecast includes a combination of job-finding and job separations rates, based on real-time data. That data includes: initial and continuing jobless claims, Google Trends unemployment topic index, Bloomberg consensus for unemployment, Morning Consult's indices, JOLTS, the Conference Board's labor market differential, and Indeed / ADP / Lightcast-based job openings rates.
• Per the Chicago Fed, the model then relates changes in the flow-consistent unemployment rate (the ratio of the job separations rate to the sum of the job finding and job separations rates) to changes in the BLS's unemployment rate to produce a BLS unemployment rate forecast.
• Based on the real-time data above, the Chicago Fed sees layoffs and other separations steady at 2.09% and the hiring rate for unemployed workers ticking up to 45.61% from 45.49%. The latter implies a very small dip in the overall unemployment rate in September.
• It reports probabilities of possible values to be published in the upcoming Employment report: it shows a roughly one-in-three chance that the unemployment rate will fall from 4.3%, with 28% prob of no change and ~40% of an increase of 0.1pp or more.