The Labor Department's report Friday

As many as 800,000 federal workers were furloughed during last month's government shutdown. The Labor Department, in its survey of 60,000 households, extrapolated the effects of the impasse to arrive at the unemployment rate.All of a sudden, the American economy is looking very resilient ― much more so than experts had thought.Despite forecasts that job growth would be sapped by the budget impasse and government shutdown, employers in the U.S. stepped up their hiring last month by adding 204,000 new jobs across a wide spectrum of industries.The increase in payrolls was almost double what many analysts were predicting and alligator shear immediately triggered speculation that the Federal Reserve would be more prone to start reducing its large bond-buying stimulus program next month.

The Labor Department's report Friday also made substantial upward revisions to job growth for the prior two months, to 163,000 in September and 238,000 in August.Taken together, the data over the last three months indicate that the American job-creation machine is not sputtering,alligator shear as some had feared, but is continuing to run at a fairly steady, if moderate, speed.The unemployment rate, however, edged up to 7.3% last month from 7.2% in September amid an unusually large drop in the total number of people working or actively looking for jobs ― what economists call the labor force.

That data injected a measure of skepticism to an otherwise optimistic report, though analysts noted that survey calculations of the unemployed and the labor force were complicated by the partial government shutdown, which temporarily furloughed hundreds of thousands of employees.The payroll numbers are based on a much larger,skin analyzer separate sample of employers, not households, and thus are considered more reliable and less volatile from month to month. Labor Department officials said they saw no discernible effect on new jobs stemming from the shutdown. The report counted federal workers on furlough as employed because they were receiving back pay.

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