NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The market hasn't been expecting much heat from the jobs market, and Wednesday's report on September private-sector hiring delivered the kind of solid-but-tepid news investors have gotten used to. Employers added 213,000 jobs at private companies, according to payroll processor Automatic Payroll Processing , narrowly beating the expected 200,000 gain and accelerating only slightly from August's 202,000 increase, which was revised from the 204,000 initially reported. Must Read: 10 Stocks Carl Icahn Loves in 2014 Hiring picked up the most at bigger companies and at manufacturers, which added 35,000 workers as businesses such as Ford and Boeing have as many as 1,000 jobs each listed on Glassdoor.com, while medium-sized companies slowed hiring. Construction, which has been a notable laggard throughout the expansion, saw hiring climb to 20,000 from 15,000 in July, even as KB Home badly missed profit estimates for the quarter ended on Aug. 31. "Gains were broad-based, and it's a pretty good number," said Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, who runs the survey for ADP. "There's been remarkable stability in growth. All of the leading indicators for the job market look good -- we're going to continue to see this kind of job creation through the rest of this year and early next.'' As has been the case for the last year, the most market-moving thing about the ADP report is how little movement it actually shows. Heading into the report, private employers had added 200,000 jobs for five months in a row, a stretch unmatched in this century. For the last year, it has added between 191,000 and 217,000 for all but three months. (Two were higher, frosty January was lower.) Must Read: Jim Cramer on the Markets: Why the IPO Deluge Must Stop The same strengths and same weaknesses are still there, even with the 4.6% annual growth clip in gross domestic product during the second quarter. Notably, housing is still a puzzle. The government saidanew-home sales rose 18%ain August, the most recent data reported, but housing starts dropped 14% after hitting a seven-year high in July, and new agreements to sell existing homes dipped 1%. None of these measures is anywhere near pre-recession levels, and construction is still down more than 1 million jobs. The same steadiness (if you like it) or torpor (if you don't) applies to other job-market measures, a report by Barclays this week pointed out. Using 14 different labor market variables, including metrics such as wage growth and long-term unemployment, the Federal Reserve is watching as it decides when to hike interest rates. Barclays concluded that the job market is improving but the pace of improvement is slowing. That's consistent with above-trend growth since March, mixed with the weak housing market and puzzling hiccups such as a weak consumer-confidence report this week. For investors, the real question is whether this will all mean interest rates will rise beginning in early to mid-2015.aZandi doesn't see the economy reaching full employment until late 2016. If he's right -- which would mean millions of people who left the work force come back -- there's little reason for rates to rise much. Bond investors and traders seem to agree as bonds didn't move much Wednesday morning, with yields on 10-year Treasuries staying at 2.51%.a With bad mojo coming from Europe and plenty of slack in the U.S. to absorb growth with little inflation, a lower-for-longer rate policy still looks like the conservative path. Rate hikes are a strategy to head off too-rapid growth, after all. Given Fed chair Janet Yellen's emphasis on wages, lower-for-longer looks like the most likely path, too. Must Read: 4 Ways UPS Is Trying to Avoid Another Holiday-Season Fiasco At the time of publication, the author held no positions in any of the stocks mentioned. This article is commentary by an independent contributor, separate from TheStreet's regular news coverage.
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