Ouch. The U.S. jobless numbers released Friday were even uglier than expected. The U.S. Labor Department says nonfarm payrolls shed 190,000 jobs in October and unemployment rose to 10.2%.

This provides a quick answer to the question of whether U.S. interest rates will be headed higher anytime soon. They won’t.

To put Friday’s numbers in perspective, it’s instructive to look back at forecasts of just a few months ago. The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan U.S. government agency, released a report in March of this year in which it projected that the U.S. unemployment rate would peak at 9.4% in late 2009. So one way to view the new unemployment numbers is to say that they are substantially worse than even the dire forecasts of this spring.

As long as unemployment stays high, interest rates will stay low in the U.S. Those rates should continue to fuel the carry trade in which speculators borrow U.S. dollars at cheap interest rates and use them to buy risky assets -- stocks, oil, commodities and emerging market assets in particular.

As the economist Nouriel Roubini argued recently, all of this is likely to end badly when the greenback stops falling and U.S. interest rates head higher. But Friday’s unemployment report appears to have put off the day for reckoning for a while.

At least some investors are already trying to find a safe haven ahead of the crash that Roubini sees ahead. One particularly interesting indicator of the growing appetite for safety is gold. James Turk, chairman of GoldMoney, believes that the metal’s recent rise to record highs can’t be explained by the usual market actions. He points out to the Financial Times that gold has surged ahead while other commodities, such as oil and silver are still stuck at or below their levels in October.

So what’s behind gold’s rise? Turk believes it’s a growing demand for the physical metal. Some investors appear to be moving out of gold ETFs -- perhaps because those investments require counterparties, such as banks, to operate smoothly. Instead, a small but growing number of investors appear to want the metal in their possession. Says Turk: