Today’s updates on nonfarm payrolls and personal income & spending beat expectations, but when you look beyond the monthly comparisons it’s not obvious that the numbers have broken free of their recent bias for slow-to-modest growth. But let’s start with the crowd’s standard obsession: headline data, which is to say the month-over-month comparisons. Private-sector payrolls increased by substantially more than expectations, rising 212,000 in October, or nearly double the consensus forecast. Meantime, personal income in September jumped 0.5%, a sizable margin over the 0.3% prediction by economists overall. Personal consumption expenditures, however, fell in line with the consensus view and advanced by a tepid 0.2%. On the surface, two healthy upside surprises and one decent gain look like a big win and perhaps a game-changing day if you were expecting darker data. But as we’ll see, putting today’s numbers in perspective suggests that nothing much has changed.