Three Reasons I Like The Jobs Report
Neither the stock nor the bond market liked this morning’s jobs report.
However, fundamentally there is much to like in the details.
Here are the top three takeaways -
The number of employed workers is up by 2.5 million year-over-year. More workers are a good thing.
Revisions to previous months were positive and broke the string of negative revision months. This provides more integrity to the current reported number and less risk that it gets revised downwards.
Wage growth continues to slow, up 0.2% month-over-month and 4% year-over-year. Rising rates and slowing wage growth give the Fed room to pause.
Therefore, more citizens are employed but the rate of total income growth is slowing. Today’s jobs report supports the assertion that the U.S. economy is in a late-cycle phase but nowhere close to an imminent recession.
Happy Friday!